Using Xenu to Scan and Fix Link Issues

Whether they realize it or not, most websites have a lot of broken links. These links are both internal and external. It is important for both user experience and seo reasons that these broken links need to be identified and fixed. In addition there has to be a mechanism in place to regularly find and fix these broken links.

This is where the Xenu link sleuth app comes in. A handy windows app that will scan your entire website and check for both internal and external links. It will then flag any broken links in its report. The scan itself can take sometime, with larger sites taking much longer, but the report will highlight any link related issues you have.

Once the scan is done, first make a separate list of broken links. Then break that down by internal and external. Fix the internal links first. Broken internal links can waste any seo value and cause index and crawl errors for search engines. Once those are eliminated, locate all the pages that have broken external links. The first step is to remove all those links and add notes that those sites are no longer available. Next find replacement links and update all the missing links with those.

There are two ways to prevent this problem building up. The first is to have a onsite message and form to ask visitors to report and broken links should the come across any. The other is to schedule a full link scan every month and to fix any issues then,