There are many tasks involved in maintaining a large website, but one of the most important comes in regularly validating your links. And that’s because a mass of broken links won’t only annoy your visitors, it’ll probably also reduce the search engine visibility which allows people to find you in the first place.

Help is at hand, though, in a variety of tools which aim to validate a site’s links for you. And LinkChecker is probably one of the most straightforward.

Getting started is easy enough: just enter the base URL, click Start and the program will begin spidering across your site, checking most link types (http:/ https:, file:, mailto:, ftp:, telnet: and nntp:).

LinkChecker highlights any problem links just as soon as they're discovered

If there are any problems then LinkChecker gives you immediate feedback by displaying them right away. The most obvious is the “Error: 404 Not Found” you’ll see when a link is dead, but it’ll also alert you to other problems which might arise: error 405’s (Method Not Allowed), http 301’s (permanent redirects), “access denied by robots.txt” errors, and more.

And while the process can take quite some time, especially on large sites, you can at least save the finished report as an HTML file for easy reference later.

Problems? We had one or two small issues with the program’s accuracy. It always correctly detected broken links, but also consistently reported 404 errors on just one or two links which opened perfectly when we inspected them manually.

A lack of configuration options was another issue. We would have liked the ability to report on only a few critical error types, for instance, ignore the 301’s so we could concentrate on what’s important, but there’s no way to do that: it’s all, or nothing.

These are relatively minor problems, though. LinkChecker scores where it counts, being free, easy to use and quick in its scans, and if your website links haven’t been validated for a while then you should probably download a copy right away.