Broken Links at a Glance is a free online broken link checker tool for sites up to 5000 unique links.
Broken Links at a Glance has the following characteristics:
Free
This service is free, so you might wonder "Where is the catch?".
The answer is, there isn't a catch. Broken Links at a Glance is a spinoff of my hobby project ZOMDir.com. I like to create websites like this in my spare time, although I also love to read a good book and walking in the nature.
Webbased
So far all software I have created is webbased. In my opinion this is the ultimate platform. By making the websites responsive the software is practically device independent.
Simple user interface
The goal was to create an easy broken link checker for small websites. Therefor the user interface should be as simple as possible. To test broken links at a website you only have to enter the address of the website and press enter. There are no options to set.
Up to 5000 unique links
Broken Links at a Glance is only suitable for relative small sites. Up to 5000 unique links of the to be tested website will be checked.
Robots.txt
When a robots.txt file is found, only the allowed links (that is the not disallowed links) are checked.
If you don't want that Broken Links at a Glance checks your website, then add the following code to your robots.txt file.
User-agent: BLaaG
Disallow: /
Links checked
In principle all links will be followed and tested.
Links which have one of the following URI schemes (that is link which starts with): 'wais:', 'file:', 'news:', 'telnet:', 'ftp:', 'gopher:', 'mailto:', 'javascript:', 'tel:' or 'view-source:' will be ignored.
Note that only links will be checked which have the same directory as the initial tested webpage. So when you start the test with the url:
https://example.zomdir.com/links/
Then links located at:
https://example.zomdir.com/
will not be tested.
Stats
The statistics of Broken Links at a Glance will probably differ from other link checkers. That is because only unique links will be checked. For example if your site has hunderds of links to your privacy page because this link occurs at every webpage in the footer, then this link to your privacy page will be checked only once.
Note that each tested link could have more than one status code. The worst case scenario is that a link is redirected, broken and probably not safe to visit.
Ok, or not ok. That's the question
At a regular base it occurs that links with other status codes than 200 OK or 301 works perfectly fine in your browser. For example this might be the case with the following status codes:
- 403 Forbidden;
- 405 Method Not Allowed. For external websites "Broken Links at a Glance" uses another method to give you results "at a glance". Most of the time following a link with this code works fine. Hence this code isn't marked bold;
- 406 Not Acceptable;
- 408 Request Timeout. This might occurs when the tested website has a relative slow responstime;
- 412 Precondition failed;
- 500 Internal Server Error
- 503 Service Unavailable
Clearly the status code returned by the webservers depends on time of the request and the identity of the requestor.
Details
Per tested page you will find the links with findings when the status code isn't 200 OK. Due to the fact that links are checked only once, links with findings are related to the first page where that link was found.
I hope you appriciate
Broken Links at a Glance,
Hans
Tip: Use a bookmarklet to find the broken links even quicker.