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Broken Link Detector 2.3 was available as a giveaway on September 1, 2018!
Check any website for dead links with the help of this lightweight software utility that enables you to export your reports for further analysis.
Nobody likes a broken link. It is a bad experience for your web site visitors.
Google recommends checking your site for broken links on a regular basis. Doing it manually would be a nightmare. Broken Link Detector runs a comprehensive scan that checks for broken links. It is common knowledge that broken links negatively impact your website since not only is the user experience spoiled, but your overall ranking is damaged, with search engines not indexing your page. Once you have installed the program on your computer, which you should know is a hassle-free process, you are welcomed by a clean user interface anyone could figure out in a matter of seconds.
At the top of the main window, you can paste the URL you want the tool to analyze, with the possibility of stopping the scan at any point by resorting to a dedicated button. To be more specific, the app can check the domain name only, strictly the subdomain name, or all domain names, with the possibility of carrying our a recursive URL scan as well. On the other hand, if you are an advanced user, you may want to take a glimpse of the aforementioned extra options so that you can manage the connection and response timeout, the agent, the ignored extensions as well as ignored.
Windows 10/ 8.1/ 8/ 7/ Vista/ XP
1 541 KB
$9.99
There used to be a bookmark checker back in late 90's called NavEx.
It throws the broken bm's into a "Unverified" folder, created by NavEx. But it wont distinguish between broken bm's and websites that up for sale nor websites that require passwords, they all go into Unverified folder. Its then up to you to manually check the true state of them.
Its not perfect but I'm still using it...some 20 years later. I looked on the net, cant find it anywhere.
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FYI here is a free alternative. Old but works:
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
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[ Eric ],
Thanks, Tilman Houser's Xenu's Link Sleuth does everything I wanted Vovosoft Broken Link Detector to do ( but doesn't ), such as
-- COLOR-HIGHLIGHT BROKEN LINKS,
-- report on the NAME a web page displays,
-- identify links to scripts, such as JavaScript 'print' links,
-- produce a copious complete report, here in an HTML page,
-- FREE.
So often, GOTD offerings are a tease where we share alternatives for comparison, and I hope this helps inspire the GOTD vendor of the day -- Vovosoft today -- to look at the alternatives and do better, in this case, -w-a-y- better.
Thanks.
.
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I'd like it to highlight a color / shade difference between good and bad links because long links move the good / bad indicator off the right edge of the screen, ( at least I can drag the good / bad column to be the the left / first column, but it does not remember that choice setting ),
... AND I'd like the columns to sort when I click on them, putting all the good links together, the bad links together, or re-sorting the web pages alphabetically.
Vovosoft Broken Link Detector ain't a powerhouse, but a useful tool through which to view a web page and see what visitors may get trapped in,
... and at FREE, it's competitive with other single-function utilities for web checking.
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Peter Blaise,
I am just trying to learn and have downloaded the program and tested it but cannot understand a statement you made in response to Laxative (Broken Link Detector will report broken links on ANY web address you point it at).
In other words, are you saying that it is "supposed" to report broken links if there are any on ANY web address you point it at and will do so
-or-
are you saying that it will report broken links on ANY web address you point it at even if there aren't any broken links?
Thanks for your help.
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Peter Blaise,
I will answer here otherwise you might not notice the response.
First off, Thank you.
Your additional text does wonders to clarify your original statement. The reason I asked for the clarification is because your original statement (Vovosoft Broken Link Detector will report broken links on ANY web address you point it at) could be taken both ways, especially if you knew what I had already discovered. If you were stating that the program reports broken links when there are none, you could have very easily said the same thing. In fact, I wondered if you were confirming what I had found in that the program DOES report broken links where there are none. I just wanted to be sure if you had found the same.
>"So, how does Broken Link Detector work for you?"
Not very well. I have a lot of other tools to compare it to, including my own in-house developed tool. I have been testing link checkers since the early days of the Internet. I have been around since the very start (started when ARPANET started), and as such, have amassed a lot of tools. I was a programmer/developer in California when the public Internet began. I worked on some of the early website technologies such as TCP/IP, and other networking protocols that became the backbone of the Internet, and for telecom companies in different countries (in the days of PTT Nederland, also British Telecom, AT&T, GTE, etc.). My work evolved as the Internet evolved. By 1995/1996, California businesses started having websites so fiercely that it was several years before other states had hardly any. It was actually odd the percentage of California business that had websites compared to other states in those early years. It was clear that I an others were working on the groundwork of what would become a world phenomenon. I traveled around the country developing and training others, and recommending tools to use. Testing a single page was a relative simple task based on the Web Consortium published standards, but testing an entire website was a much harder problem to crack, so I latched onto every tool that claimed to do what Broken Link detector claims to do.
Over the years, I have used just about every tool known to test websites, including Xenu Link Sleuth, which was one of the early successes in this arena. I started using it back in the 1990s. Its competition was expensive and offered no significant advantages, so I recommended it often. When Deep Trawl became available, it became the master of web analysis tools. It has been one of the most expensive consumer level programs to tackle website analysis in great depth. I still use it but it does need some updating. Deep Trawl takes a long time to process, so a quick link checker is often all that is needed to see if during some maintenance, mistakes were made. Many competing web analysis tools have come along and some went, and many just claim to do link checking. I am always excited to see what a new link checking tool can offer. Now there are quite a few now, including ones as apps on SmartPhones. I test them all. Broken Link Detector is sadly one of the worst I have seen. Sad, because it could at least do what it claims with just a few fixes.
THE OVERALL BASIC RULE
The main rule of thumb for any link checker is to not go outside the confines of the starting URL unless specifically directed to do so. Broken Link Detector fails miserably; I have never seen any other link checker have such disregard as Broken Link Detector. Most link checkers will crawl/spider pages at the starting level or below only, and without being told to only crawl those pages. Other link checkers have a switch to ensure the program does not go outside the confines of the starting URL. Broken Link Checker neither has such a feature, nor does it seem to care. As a result, Broken Link Detector fails with incorrect results, and it starts crawling other websites that it should never start with.
Broken Link Detector not only looks at ACTUAL LINKS, but it also tests any TEXT it comes across that APPEARS TO BE A URL as if it were an actual link. I had turned off external links (made into comments) to save time in testing, but Broken Link Detector tested them anyway as if they were links. Worse yet is that it then began testing links on the external website, wasting lots of time showing me the status of someone else's pages I do not care about.
One of the very first comments on Broken Link Detector posted here stated "Has bugs, unable to construct links properly in complex sites." I also found that to be true.
Another posted commented on their test that lead to Amazon pages, and how it then began testing other pages on Amazon. I also found that to be true.
Testing text as links is just as bad as the other faults.
Those three downfalls are the ones that make the current version of Broken Link Detector a waste of time. Even if those three were fixed, it would still not compare to Xenu Link Sleuth. At $9.99, it isn't very expensive but it is hard to compete with the free Xenu Link Sleuth.
AN EASY TEST
Broken Link Detector starts each time with the vovsoft.com website as the starting URL to test, and recursive Scan on. Click Star. Anyone that lets it start on that website will soon see that it is attempting to spider its way through Facebook and Twitter leads it found on the Vovsoft website until it bogs down to a crawl. That cannot be what any web developer would want a link checker to do.
I have tested Broken Link Detector in several websites of varying sizes, and so far, it has not been able to finish checking a single one. It always finds something that causes it to go far beyond the area it should be testing, and continues in this manner until it bogs down to a crawl. I have not taken the time to create something that does not even have text that looks like external links to see if it can complete a full website scan.
DOES IT EVER WORK?
I do not know. If there are no external links, and all links are fully qualified, then maybe. Broken Link Detector may not report broken links on pages where the links are fully qualified, but for websites that use relative address links, the program forms invalid URLs to check, then because those URLs do not exist, it reports that they are broken.
HOW I TEST
I test on a localhost server, which is faster than local to remote and back testing. I have created my own development framework, which allows me to set up some extensive test conditions to ensure a tool can do what it claims. One feature I used was to turn all external links off (made into comments).
The websites I tested not only have no broken links, but they also have no HTML validation errors, and were coded to XHTML 1.1 STRICT DOCTYPE standards, that are often then converted to HTML 5 standards (I maintain a copy of both for testing). Of all the websites on the Internet, the likelihood of a common website having zero validation errors is less than one tenth of one percent. That is like lining up 1,000 people claiming to be web developers, and knowing that the odds are that only one will be able to produce a 100% error free website. That makes it hard to choose a web developer. Most choose based on appearance of a website, but there are no search engines based on appearance. I produce 100% error free code. That is the level of quality I produce for all the work I do, so when I test a tool that is not supposed to find any errors on a website that has none, but it does instead, then I know it has a problem. Broken Link detector has a problem.
>"Vovosoft Broken Link Detector will report broken links on ANY web address you point it at ... IF there are any broken links that fit within the criteria Broken link Detector uses to assess broken links ...."
I have no idea what criteria it uses but I know what it claims, and it does indeed fail, including reporting broken links where there are none, so your statement would be just as accurate without your additional clarification.
An example: On a website that has 2,544 valid links, of which 196 are external when in production (comments during this test), was tested by several other programs ranging from link checkers to sitemap generators to deep website analysis tools, all confirming there are no broken links, and neither any errors in the error_log file, I found that Vovsoft Broken Link Detector was reporting on links that do not exist in the website as being broken. How many? Broken Link Detector indicates that it had found nearly 29,000 links at the time I stopped it (due to it spidering some external website 8 hours after I started the test). The ratio of actual links to what Broken Link Detector claims is impressive. How did I get the figure? I already knew from numerous other tools the exact number of local links and external links.
From the Broken Link Detector exported report I made a copy of the file as it stood when I ended the program, and removed every result line of the website I was checking to see how many were local and how many were external. I found that there were 23,063 external URLs in the report (when there should be zero), and only 5,905 were local. The problem with the local link count is that it is more than double the accurate number of local links, probably from the incorrect URLs it forms to test. So even if it stayed within the confines of the localhost website, it would list way more bad links than good (10 to 1 ratio), a pretty bad outcome for a website that has no broken links at all per several other tools, and has no entries in the standard error_log file.
Very definitely Broken Link Detector does report broken links on a website that has none.
So, when I read your statement, I wondered if you had finally found the same thing as I had found, which was contradictory to one of your earlier statements. I know that you very often do some testing of products offered here, and share your experience. I look forward to your contributions. I am a fan. I got your BluRay Creation Disk in a standard DVD player joke when others apparently did not (please do not say that was not a joke). Your suggestions of improvements for this program was getting negative votes. I up-voted you because they were all very important needs (I wish it had a pause button too).
But when your statements confuse me, and I cannot detect that it is a joke, I have to ask for clarification.
I believe that anyone that spends any amount of time testing this program will surely see that it is defective in accomplishing what it intends to do. In your statement regarding Xenu Link Sleuth, you also confirm that Broken Link Detector is not very good, which arouses my curiosity as to the explanation of one of your earlier statements that you used Vovosoft Link Detector, which I presume you mean Vovsoft Broken Link Detector:
"I use Vovosoft Link Detector on other people's web site to bolster my criticism and embarrass them into fixing their mess."
"Vovosoft Link Detector also helps me audit and confirm that someone else's web site I'm having trouble with is broken, and it's not my fault that I can't navigate it."
How can you do that if the program fails so miserably? Maybe that was a joke too but it seems that you did not mean it to be a joke. You made it sound like this is a tool you have used in the past.
Now, I believe you have started to realize. Xenu Link Sleuth will do a much better job for you. Xenu has its own problems but it has come a long way from the first releases. Mainly now, the report is not formatted correctly at the end of sections, and the report will show multiple entries of the same page, plus the generated sitemap often needs some weeding.
Xenu is known to be fast compared to several alternatives, but I have websites that still take several hours for Xenu to finish, and that is on an Intel i7 6700K with 16G DDR4 RAM. I'm always looking for something faster. Speed is important but it is not the most important thing. The most important feature is that the Link Checker must first work correctly. Broken Link Detector does not.
Any tool that produces a sitemap will verify links. I have found that online tools often stall on larger websites, and some local installed ones fail with larger websites. I work with a lot of very large websites. I write some of the deep internals, and libraries that support the upper levels. My career has mainly been involved in fault-tolerant banking software. Banks do not want defective website pages. It isn't easy finding the ideal link checker software program. I had hoped Broken Link Detector would be such a tool. It was not.
At least I believe Vovsoft can get the biggest flaws fixed. They have created usable tools in the past, so I anxiously await an improved version.
To wrap up with your PS:
>"PS -- Do you also ask Anti Virus program that claim to find viruses ... IF they find viruses even when there are no viruses there ... "
I might if their statement was not clear, but mostly, No, because clearly they often do report there are viruses where there are none. Obviously you know that, so I do not understand why you would choose this as an example, or I missed the joke.
>or ask pain-reliever drugs if they relieve pains that are not there ... or ... ?
Doctors have often reported that patients report pains when there should not be any. Clinical studios have shown that patients can be tricked into claiming they have pains as a result of a harmless test or told that while they were sedated something should have caused them pain. Also, they have demonstrated that both a pain-reliever and a placebo have had equal effect in curing those non-existing pains. Pharmaceutical companies test all of their drugs and compare the results of ones taking the drug with ones taking a placebo. Very often the placebo itself has amazing pain relieving capabilities to the point that there have been rare cases where the placebo outperformed the actual drugs. I learned that from a pharmaceutical conference that was discussing how to handle these embarrassing situations.
So no, I wouldn't dare waste my time asking pain-reliever drugs if they relieve pains that are not there. No telling what response I would get or how to interrupt it or believe it.
But, when I see a statement that can be interrupted two ways, I very often will ask for a clarification. ... if I don't get the joke.
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I am not clear about this `broken link'. Does it refer to trouble on a site you visit or on one of your own? Which does the programme claim to deal with?
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[ Laxative ],
Vovosoft Broken Link Detector will report broken links on ANY web address you point it at ...
... with recursing off, it totals and checks the pages on the site, with recurse on, it check off-site links, too ...
... which you would know if you downloaded it, checked, it, and tried it.
So, download it, check it, and try it, and report on what you find.
Thanks.
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Laxative, I haven't tried it yet, so I can't say how it works, but a link d use it to check websites already on line (on the public web)
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(My last comment got jumbled)
Laxative, I haven't tried it yet, so I can't say how it works, but it would only be useful to check out your own website even if you could use it on publically accessible websites.
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Au contraire, [ Marq ],
I use Vovosoft Link Detector on other people's web site to bolster my criticism and embarrass them into fixing their mess.
Vovosoft Link Detector also helps me audit and confirm that someone else's web site I'm having trouble with is broken, and it's not my fault that I can't navigate it.
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Laxative,
It is for one of your own websites. If your own website has broken links, it will frustrate others; same as when you visit a website and come across a broken link, which generally causes a 404 page error (page not found).
The problem is that this program Broken Link Detector does a miserable job, so you are not missing out on anything with this tool.
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Gary, Many thanks.
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Peter Blaise,
I am just trying to learn and have downloaded it and tested it but cannot understand your statement. In other words, are you saying that it is "supposed" to report broken links if there are any on ANY web address you point it at and will do so
-or-
are you saying that it will report broken links on ANY web address you point it at even if there aren't any broken links?
Thanks for your help.
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.
[ Gary ],
Vovosoft Broken Link Detector will report broken links on ANY web address you point it at ... IF there are any broken links that fit within the criteria Broken link Detector uses to assess broken links ....
( PS -- Do you also ask Anti Virus program that claim to find viruses ... IF they find viruses even when there are no viruses there ... or ask pain-reliever drugs if they relieve pains that are not there ... or ... ? )
So, how does Broken Link Detector work for you?
I prefer Tilman Houserr's Xenu's Link Sleuth [ http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html ], which does everything I wanted Vovosoft Broken Link Detector to do ( but doesn't ), such as
-- COLOR-HIGHLIGHT BROKEN LINKS,
-- report on the NAME a web page displays,
-- identify links to scripts, such as JavaScript 'print' links,
-- produce a copious complete report, here in an HTML page,
-- FREE.
So often, GOTD offerings are a tease where we share alternatives for comparison, and I hope this helps inspire the GOTD vendor of the day -- Vovosoft today -- to look at the alternatives and do better, in this case, -w-a-y- better.
Thanks.
.
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I don't like the way this software works - but it does work.
I tested it on my website and had 2 options - there's a button that says: recursive url … if I didn't tick it then it wouldn't check my site past the home page - so it was pointless to me.
If I checked the recursive option - it was running through to the pages that I link to and wanting to check all the links on those pages too - in other words - I link to Amazon and if you go to that page there will be 100s of links to other Amazon products / promotions etc. It seemed to be picking all those up too. Same with Google Play. So although in theory it worked - I stopped it when it got to 2 700 links - as with every link checked that list was just growing.
There is an option to exclude certain sites - but then you're going to have to fill in every external site you link to in that list - for me that would be more trouble than it's worth.
Also on a number of the links to Amazon it showed "service unavailable" but I could copy and paste that link and it was working fine - opened the page immediately. Not sure then what "service unavailable" actually meant.
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Sorry guys. Installed, tested and deleted.
Has bugs, unable to construct links properly in complex sites. I was scared when I saw showing up so many "broken links".
Please don't ask for details. I'm not Beta tester.
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I was expecting a tool that runs like a job, checks all your bookmarks & deletes the dead ones, but I guess not from earlier comments. What's the difference between this tool & me just cut and pasting each link into the address line and manually testing them myself? Thanks
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Tried but uninstalled. Not what I was expecting.
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I'd really like to try out this program. I have several websites and it isn't easy making sure all the outbound links are still working. Unfortunately when I tried to install the app, Windows Defender came up and said it protected me from an unrecognized app that may put my PC at risk. Now I know I could get around that, but I don't see that message very often for other giveaways. It would be worth this publisher's time to go through whatever channels necessary to get the app to pass Windows Defender without issue. I do still have Fast Link Checker given away here in April 2017. It's not a pretty app but it continues to work.
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[ Aaron ],
Turn off Microsoft Windows Defender.
YOU da boss, not Microsoft.
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Downloaded, installed and activated fine on my Win 10 64bit computer. It is currently checking 1409 links on one of my websites. This program will be very useful to me.
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Eddie, exactly the same for me, testing it now too
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If you are hoping that this will scan the bookmarks in your browser and check the links then this will not be for you.
You have to enter the links yourself and check.
Useful for those with websites that want to check for errors in links.
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Bob, this tool is no longer supported
https://aignes.com/deadlink.htm
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