I’ve found a reasonably good free spider for checking for dead links, www.dead-links.com. When I told it to spider my main site www.coker.com.au it worked well and informed me of several dead links that I fixed. When I told it to spider my blog it reported an error 404 and didn’t give any useful output. Strangely it was able to display a thumbnail picture of my main blog page that correctly had all data.
I was wondering if it didn’t like WordPress so I tested it out on Chris Samuel’s blog [ www.csamuel.org ]. It seemed to have no problems with his blog, so I suspected that it was the request time. I reduced the number of blog posts shown on the front page of my blog to 1 to speed things up (which resulted in my page loading faster than his) but still the dead-links.com spider didn’t like me.
I now suspect that it’s something related to me using WordPress 2.2. I would be interested in feedback from other people who try checking their blogs for dead links, whether they are using WordPress 2.2 or something else.
In any case it’s a useful service and I recommend using it.
It seems to have a few problems…
http://blizzard.dnsalias.org/weblog/ 404 Not Found
http://picasaweb.google.com/ozzmosis/ 404 Not Found
I prefer Xenu Link Sleuth … http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
When it finishes checking it displays the message: “The dead link checker can report as a broken link any address if the time to get any response is higher than a fixed limit. The timeout is deliberately short to make a faster analysis. Repeat the analysis if you have any doubt.”
Maybe your blog timed out and that’s why it reported a 404. The explanation I find for displaying the thumbnail is that is getting it from somewhere else [0], dead-links.com is not parsing the html.
That’s what sounds more logical to me.
Cheers!
AlvAro
[0] http://open.thumbshots.org/image.pxf?url=http://tuxie.debianuruguay.org/
Broken Link Checker…
Wer als BetreiberIn einer Webseite einmal all die schon vor Urzeiten gesetzten Links überprüfen möchte, aber keine Lust hat diese manuell durchzuklicken, hat nun eine Möglichkeit gefunden:…