Charles Lau dot Com

Introduction
Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a small little windows program which helps you to find broken links in your website. It is very important that your website does not contain any broken links because that may cause your website to be ranked lower because of poor link “voting”.

Installation
It is simple to install. Just click on the download button from that Xenu’s Link Sleuth website, you will see a zip file. Open it and you will see a single setup file. Double click it and install it correctly and run it. It’s just a very small file.

Strengths
It seems to be important to check for broken links on your site because it affects your Google results. Check this link at Google Group discussion. They discovered that Google has not been crawling on his site for 6 weeks! And the web author later found out that he has so many broken links.. All thanks to Xenu’s Link Sleuth. This program has a good documentation

Flaws
There is something which I don’t really like about this program. If your site contains a lot of videos from YouTube, or PDF links, your links will return a 404 error. This is true as those aren’t web pages and hence a 404. However, you have to ignore this part if you encounter 404 errors.

How It Works
We can see that we want to set which url to go.

You see the “More Options” on top? Click that and you will see below:

While it is running

And after it’s done, it will be able to produce a report for you to take a look closely all the links you need to improve in order for the search engines to see properly… Have fun using it! It’s free!