SEO Tool - xenu

July 30, 2007 on 10:14 am | In Search Engine Marketing |
by James Stacy Jones

One of the tools that I use to quickly find broken links on a web site as well as tell me the titles of the pages. http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

The first thing you do is enter the url of the web site you would like to check. When I first check a site I do not check for external links, I run the report for inner linking. Let me give you an example: I was working on dugoutsports.com. XENU got stuck on url by producing more and more urls like this:

http://dugoutsports.magnetiksimedia.com/products_new.php?amp;action=buy_now&
products_id=21&page=1&products_id=96&action=buy_now&products_id=83

It kept adding the & over and over. So fixed it first. Then I noticed that my .htaccess was working for the linking page. So I fixed it next so the urls went from looking like this:

http://dugoutsports.magnetiksimedia.com/links.php?lPath=1&page=1&page=1&sort=2a

to this: http://www.dugoutsports.com/softball-leagues-l-1.html

Last but not least I noticed that pages the products new page with pagination was causing the spider a lot of issues so I came up with 2 solutions.

• Use the robot.txt file to tell the spiders not to index those pages.
• Change the setting to show only one page with no pagination.

I chose the later. After I ran the next report there were no broken links. Then I decided to check the external links by clicking the checkbox option. It found one broken external link to a pdf. So I uploaded the pdf to the server and referenced it locally.

I hope this too will help someone with their internal and external broken links.