Link Testing Tools For Webmasters To Use In Site SEO Audit

As an example, Netpeak Spider Software is one of the fastest, most flexible, and most in-depth crawlers out there with edible Link Testing Tools. Helping you go through the entire website and signaling any SEO or usability errors. In addition, it helps you to easily diagnose your overall website’s SEO health so that you can fix any link errors and unwanted site issues timely.

Simply put, it’s a tool that checks everything on a website for reports. Including main pages, to find potential issues to correct. Eventually, Netpeak Spider and Checker analyze competitors and their activities across the web. You can spend hours doing it manually, or you can use these special tools. And then, get the whole picture in several minutes and not hours.

Eventually, we highly recommend Netpeak Spider and Checker for SEOs as they help to automate a lot of manual tasks. Equally important, we really appreciate the Netpeak Spider working speed and the amount of data it can process. It’s so easy to spot issues with it when performing quick wins audits. You’ll also see what a tremendous job the team has done.

Particularly, with their release of the latest Netpeak Spider Tool for SEO webmasters to make their content SEO audit efforts look/feel seamless and easy. Specifically, it’s a toolkit that even competes quite well in terms of functionality — in comparison to the other related/similar advanced web crawlers worldwide. It’s a great tool to test and fix site backlinks…

What Website Backlinks Are Plus Why They Matter

By all means, if you’ve read anything about or studied SEO best practices, you’ve come across the term “Backlinks” at least once. And for those of you new to SEO, you may be wondering what Backlinks are — as well as why website backlinks are important too. Not forgetting, they have become so important to the scope of Search Engine Optimization, for webmasters.

So much so that they have become the main SEO building blocks that most SEOs and webmasters are already implementing their essential features in their main content SEO audit and other strategic marketing plans. In general, Google and other major search engines consider backlinks “votes” for specific website pages in order to position them by rank.

And, as a result, web pages with a high number of backlinks tend to have high organic search engine rankings. After all, while we battle daily to create an uptick in our analytics when we’re reviewing our “google / organic” or “google / CPC” traffic, there can be a lot of missed opportunities. Sometimes it pays to take our blinders off the normal hook we are in.

So that we can look at the myriad of other opportunities around us that can create bigger improvements in traffic and/or conversions with less work. That said, Backlinks — also known as Inbound Links (IBLs) — are links that are directed toward your website. The number of any given backlink’s presence is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website.

So, backlinks (see the full backlinks guide) are also important Feature elements for SEO (for website ranking on page one). Simply, because some top search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks. And even consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

Using Link Testing Tools To Fix Broken Links

For instance, when search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of quality inbound links to that site. So, you should not be satisfied with merely getting inbound links, it is the quality of the inbound link that matters. In other words, a search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the quality of the links.

That’s why it’s important to use link-testing tools in order to fix any broken links on your website. For instance, we may suggest the Broken Link Checker as the best tool to test and monitor your overall website backlinks (both internal and external links). Basically, broken links on your website pages or blog posts have a huge effect on your overall SEO results.

Whether you own a professional website or just have a personal website, you wouldn’t want your sites to have broken links. The good news is that to verify broken links, and website availability, there’re a lot of link testing tools in the market. And, oftentimes, which does an easy job of checking and making our web life easy — among other website SEO activities.

To enumerate, website link testing refers to the practice of checking your overall website performance insights — for possible bugs, or even broken links that may hinder the workability of various website-related functions. And, it’s a very essential activity that most professional webmasters do consider even before moving the code into the actual production environment.

How The Link Testing Tools Usually Work

Of course, you too are trying to figure out what the best tools for testing broken web links are, right? And if so, you have likely done some research and know there are a lot of options. From complex Java log parser tools to other tools that are much more simple in design, free logging tools, or great tools for website link audit, verification, or link testing tools.

In reality, all these unique tools can help you to maintain and manage any given web-based business — may it be startups or even large websites — to quickly ensure that not a single user clicks on a dead link or sees a box for a missing image. These tools check for broken links, images, and missing pages by going deep into multiple levels of the site for verification.

However, good tools don’t just tell you that there are broken links or dead links, but they’ll also tell you exactly where they are for easy auditing and fixation. Some of the great link-testing tools that you’ll find below are ones that even our very own team of Digital Online Webmasters uses to help make sure website visitors are not frustrated by pages that don’t work.

In short, website broken link testing is all about testing and evaluating a group of link units to ensure that they correctly operate. It is normally performed after the unit has been tested. Link Testing would be the initial testing that starts at the design stage where we create the test cases. The goal is to test each and every link that forms part of the design.

Here Is More To What Is Tested:

Browser Full Page Test, Hostname Test
MX Record Lookup, NS Record Lookup, and SPF Lookup
Reverse DNS and Blacklist Check
Server Test, Port Scan, SPF Parser, and PING
General Website Test and individual Web Page Test
HTTP Headers Test and Behind China Firewall
Email Validation Test and Certificate Validation
WHOIS, Traceroute, and TCP Traceroute
IP Lookup and Network Lookup
MTR Traceroute & Ping, and much more…

In general, Broken Links are some sort of webpage URLs that: when navigating through a certain website, the server gives the answer “the page does not exist or is not found” as a result. This means, that the link, document, or image requested by the user may not really exist or may be “dead.” Due to a malfunction error, server error, or even a site configuration error.

With this in mind, the task of every webmaster and website owner is to ensure that there are no links to non-existing pages, documents, and files on the site, both external and internal. Perse, so that whenever the web user is clicking on any site link, is guaranteed to go to the next page and see the expected content there. Thus, broken links are equal to a bad image.

Why It Is Important To Fix Your Website Broken Links

For example, let’s say a person came for information on your site and saw a link on the topic. Then again, the same user clicks on it, but there’s nothing there. Well, that’s very bad for your website business. Equally, Search Engine like Google is yet another reason to care about your broken/dead links. Luckily, in the next section, you’ll see some of the best tools (stay put).

Moving on, just imagine this:– That the search crawler bot goes to your website and regularly stumbles upon bad or broken links. This will affect your crawling budget and overall website performance. Often, a functional link is a guarantee of page quality. Whereby, the internal links and the links that lead to your website can have a big influence on your search rankings.

This is why cleaning up broken links adds quality to your content. Whilst, making your website page(s) scannable for various Search Engines in return as well. From our very own experience, broken links are a common problem that has been present on the Internet since its beginning. There’s not a website that isn’t susceptible to broken links (so, you are not alone)!

Resource Reference: Search Engine | Why Is It So Important For Content Webmasters?

Even some of the biggest tech monsters online such as Cisco have at least 5% of their links broken. In short, broken links are something that can cause serious damage to your WordPress site and to your reputation as a business. And if users get 404 errors, aka “page not found” in their browsers when they want to visit one of your pages, don’t freak out!

For one thing, there are numerous ways to fix broken links for your website — we’ll focus on the most practical ones down below. The worst thing about broken links is that they are invisible. It’s rare for the webmaster to have full-fledged analytics – which hyperlinks and which pages users click on. A year or two passes on, and some of those forgotten links become broken.

Always remember, your users come to the website on request and want to surf the Internet effectively and efficiently. Keep in mind, that if they find out that the link they visited does not work out as planned – the links are broken (they are just dead) – the next thing is for them to leave your website. And, since the webmaster does not often know about this, it becomes messy.

Getting Started With Broken Link Checker Plugin

For your information, the number of pages indexed by search engines is growing rapidly every day. Whilst, thousands of new sites are being created, hundreds are ceasing to exist. Although working sites periodically change their CNC and content, you should try to add new pages and files. Likewise, try slimming your content through an SEO Audit.

While, at the same time, weeding out irrelevant content or deleting old web pages and files that have long retired. Markedly, as we mentioned, broken links are site URLs that when navigating through the server give the answer “the page does not exist or is not found.” Meaning, that the link, document, or image requested may not really exist or maybe even “dead.”

If you may recall, Broken Link Checker Plugin is a toolkit that monitors and tests all internal links and external links on your website — whilst, looking for all those broken links and then giving you a full update report (either on your WordPress website dashboard or by email). Realistically, it helps you fix bad links to improve SEO and user experience.

Broken Link Checker Plugin Features:

Monitors both external links and internal links
Ins and outs of your blog posts, pages, comments, blogroll, and custom fields (optional)
Detects links that don’t work, missing images, and redirects.
Notifies you either via the Dashboard or by email.
Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional).
Prevents search engines from following broken links (optional).
You can search and filter links by URL, anchor text, and so on.
Links can be edited directly from the plugin’s page, without manually updating each post.
It’s highly configurable with simple setting tools

Once you install/activate the plugin (get files), it will immediately begin parsing your posts, bookmarks (blogroll), and other content and looking for links. Depending on the size of your site this can take from a few minutes up to an hour or more. And then again, when the parsing process is complete, the plugin will start checking each link to see if it works as intended.

Suffice it to say, how long this takes depends on how big your site is and how many links there are. Not forgetting, you can even monitor the whole process progress as well as tweak various link-checking options in Settings -> Link Checker too — all this for free! You can either get this plugin right away or even learn how Broken Link Checker works first in detail.

The Topmost Best Link Testing Tools To Fix Error Issues

Generally, whether you own a professional website or just have a personal website, you wouldn’t want your sites to have broken links. To verify broken links, and site availability, there’re a lot of tools in the market which does an easy check and make our life easy. Bearing in mind, weblink testing works as a group of modules to ensure that they operate correctly.

Normally, in combination, it is something that’s performed after the individual modules have been tested in isolation and prior to the integration testing that is performed for the complete system. Of course, you too are trying to figure out what tools are best for testing your web applications. And if so, you have likely done some research and know there are a lot of options.

Reference Resource: Web Testing Tools | A Complete Step-by-step Guidelines

From complex Java log parser tools to other tools that are much more simple in design. And as such free logging tools too. So, what are the benefits of link-testing tools really? Simply put, web testing refers to checking your website for possible bugs that may hinder the performance of various website functions. Whereby, testing is essential before moving the site code.

Especially, before moving the code into the actual production environment. After all, nobody likes a slow website. The test is designed to help make your site faster by identifying what about a webpage that is fast, slow, too big, and so on. There are some other advantages of link testing tools.

Consider the following:

It supports multiple projects
Easy export and import of test cases
Easy to integrate with many defect management tools
Automated test cases execution through XML-RPC
Easy filtration of test cases with version, keywords, test case ID, and version
Provide credentials to multiple users and assign roles to them
Easy to assign test cases to multiple users
Easy to generate test plans and test reports in various formats

But, different tools provide different features and work on different platforms. Some tools can be accessed online while some require installation. With that being said, below are some of the tools that we do use and recommend to you.

1. Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler that helps you improve onsite SEO, by extracting data & auditing for common SEO issues. It allows you to download and crawl 500 URLs for free, or rather, you can go ahead and buy a license to remove the limit and access advanced features. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a fast and advanced SEO site audit tool.

It can be used to crawl both small and very large websites, where manually checking every page would be extremely labor intensive, and where you can easily miss a redirect, meta refresh, or duplicate page issue. The name ”Screaming Frog” is inspired by a frog that stood up for itself after being cornered by two cats in Dan’s back garden.

This’s website crawler and an excellent tool if you are looking for checking broken links for medium to large sites. It comes as a desktop application that is very easy to install and can work on any PC, Mac, or Linux machine. The main checking done by this tool is from an SEO perspective. You may start right away, Download Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool for free.

2. W3C Link Checker and Free Link Checker

An online Open Source tool that lets a user validate links, and CSS style sheets, and check for objects if any referenced in a web page. This utility is one of the validator tools provided by W3C. Definitely, it’s a good one to go for since this is free.

In that case, you can Download W3C Link Checker for free! Similarly, Free Link Checker is a desktop freeware tool that does a broken link check. The program includes an HTML links spider and a broken link analyzer. The Free Link Checker equally provides various settings for broken link checks. Whilst, displaying all invalid links reports and tracking progress.

As well as assisting in setting up authentication (username and password) and proxy. Start right away whenever you are ready and Download Free Link Checker for your website at any time. You can always share your user experience with us later.

3. Dead Link Checker

Basically, the Dead Link Checker is a free broken link checker. And it’s a tool that supports checking through multiple sites at one go. Also, it has a feature of auto check where a user can schedule a website check using a dead link checker.

And once the process completes, the tool automatically sends a report. By the same token, to start right now, you can Download The Dead Link Checker for free to see if it will suit your website better than the other similar/related tools.

4. Online Website Link Checker

On the other hand, Online Website Link Checker is an Open Source online tool that checks for broken links. This tool allows users with a feature to set the maximum number of pages to be searched.

At the same time, users can also define depth which means the tool should just search the source page or all the pages. Without much further ado, go ahead and Download Online Website Link Checker to start checking/fixing errors right away!

5. Website Pulse and SortSite

Website Pulse is a Link Checker that verifies the URL availability while downloading the complete HTML content. And in addition, it checks the availability of all the internal components and of all links present on the page.

In addition, it also provides features for the Website test, Web Page Test, and HTTP Headers test. Equally important, SortSite is a desktop application for Mac OS X and Windows. This works on a single click and checks for all accessibility errors.

As well as broken links, compatibility, SEO, privacy, web standards, and usability. It’s a very fast tool and tests all the pages available on the website. With this in mind, you can Download Website Pulse or even Download SortSite to get started.

6. Cyber Spyder Link Test and Link Scan

The Cyber Spyder Link Test is used to verify broken URLs on a website. This works well on sites of all sizes ranging from personal websites to very large sites with numerous links. This is one of the cheapest tools available in the market for WebLink Verification. You can go ahead and learn more about the Cyber Spyder Link Test in detail.

And, as for elsop.com (aka LinkScan™), it’s an industrial-strength link-checking and website management tool. Not to mention, it is compatible with UNIX and Microsoft Windows operating systems. With Perl Version 5 or later installed and it is designed to be compatible with any HTTP 1.0 or HTTP 1.1 compliant web server. So, Download Link Scan for free today.

7. Online Broken Link Checker and Site24X7

Also known as a revolutionary online tool, the Online Broken Link Checker scans the website for broken links. While supporting validation for both internal and external URLs, it lets users know the error location. And it can as well as scan an unlimited number of pages. What are you waiting for? Just Download The Online Broken Link Checker to give it a try.

Basically, Site24X7 features 4 validation tools, a server header tool that checks server headers and verifies the HTTP status codes. A link Checker that checks for Broken Links. As well as a Code Cleaner which Cleans up HTML code while optimizing your webpages. It’s also an HTML Code validator that Validates your domain HTML code based on W3C standards.

8. Xenu’s Link Sleuth and Pingdom Tools

Moving on, Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a tool that checks Web sites for broken links. Allowing Link verification on “normal” links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts, and java applets. It provides features for rechecking all your broken links. As well as an easy report-generation feature that can be mailed straight to the users.

Start right away when you Download Xenu’s Link Sleuth and see it in full action. The Pingdom Website Monitoring Tools also help end-users analyze the load speed of the websites and learn how to make them faster. This Tool examines all parts of a web page, and checks for website conformance to performance best practices from Google Page Speed.

And, in the end, it let users test from multiple locations and also trace performance history. You can learn more about how to Download Pingdom Tools and even use them correctly on your website in full detail.

9. Web Link Validator and Link Tiger

Forthwith, Web Link Validator is a powerful link checker and site management tool for webmasters to check links for accuracy and availability and find broken links and links containing syntactic errors. This Tool is a real help for anyone who wants to maintain the quality of their websites. This improves potential customers and website User Experience (UX) even more.

It keeps track of broken links and checks the accuracy of HTML code. In that case, you can Download Web Link Validator to get started. Similarly, Link Tiger, on the other hand, hunts websites for broken links and generates broken link reports. This tool doesn’t require any downloads and allows for a website scan 24X7. This tool comes with excellent on-screen visualization.

As well as other unique reporting features. It not only finds broken links in web pages but also checks for broken links in a variety of contextual formats. May it be PDF, CSS, FLASH, JavaScript, or MS Office document on your website. So, go ahead with the effectiveness of this tool if you’ll first Download Link Tiger to see it in full action on your website for free today.

10. Link Verify

Last but not least, we’ve got the Link Verify on this list too. It’s a Link Checker which runs in Java Supported Browser. This basically checks for a set of hypertext files and validates all the references to external resources that are working or not. In the case of HTML, it checks for embedded images and hyperlinks.

Additionally, it also checks for style sheets. When running through the browser, the tool has access only to the files available on that server. So, to have full control of all files, the tool should be installed on local systems. Start now as soon as you can manage! Go ahead and Download Link Verify Tool to see how it works on your website head-on.

Other Key Tools:

What’s more, some if not all the above-mentioned link testing tools also check single HTML pages for conformance with accessibility standards to ensure the content can be accessed by everyone. As well as search engine result page bots.

Before we conclude, on one hand, the performance of your web application affects your overall business reputation presence and awareness potential more than you think. And that’s why all these link-testing tools come in handy! While on the other hand, top engineering organizations consider performance not only as nice-to-have but as a crucial feature of their products.

So, you see! You now have a great start to find, test, and utilize the perfect complementary link-testing tools for your commercial web-based business. Likewise, bear in mind, that in today’s world, you can find a web designer who doesn’t know at least a little HTML and CSS. A good creative content designer must be all-rounded to cater to all your web business.

Consult Our Web Tech Experts Taskforce Today!

As aforementioned, you won’t have to look far for a front-end web developer who can whip up a storyboard. For one thing, most people learn web coding because they want to create the next Facebook or find a job in the industry. But, that’s not the same mission as our very able content designers and SEO webmasters. There’s just so much we can do for you.

Unfortunately, most engineering teams do not regularly test the performance and scalability of their infrastructure, and most lack the tools to properly do so. Although you can find plenty of commercial tool options out there, for the right organization, free and open-source tools may be a good alternative too. But, nothing beats consulting great SEO experts!

Located at At Maasai Mall – Ongata Rongai, the Web Tech Experts Taskforce, together with the Digital Online Web is powered by a technology-oriented and professionally elevated team that offers all-inclusive Solution Services to all potential customers and clients who ask for our hand – just like yourself. Whatever the need is, we are always here to sort you out.

Other More Related Resources:

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