As I mentioned in a recent blog, Vertical Leap has a lots of tools that we use to manage our campaigns, and we have made a few of these available for the use of everyone else. The one I spoke about last was Looking at where your website is and today I will look at the Vertical Leap Broken Link Checker. We have mentioned this before, but I thought I would show you how easy it is to use!

I know from my former existence of learning web design techniques, that these broken links can pop up anywhere, it only takes 1 extra character here, or a renamed file without suitably updating everywhere, and before you know it the site will be littered with broken links. These aren't good for your users, and they certainly aren't good for search engines either.

So if you go to the Broken Links Checker you will be greeted with the following screen:

Fill in your details to request your report. If it has been successful you will be greeted with a thank you screen, telling you that the report is on its way to you. Please note, you wont get this report instantaneously, it has some checks to perform on your site before it gets back to you!

When you receive the report it will hopefully look something like this:

If you are lucky enough to get this screen, then our checker doesn't think that your site has any broken links. However, I would suspect that these would be in the minority.  

The check always looks for a robot.txt first and this will appear first on this list if it isn't in use on the site:

There are other ones that you are may encounter such as these:

If a link is broken such as the first example above, it will tell you what line of the code the broken link is located at as well as the page that it is linking to.

Sometimes if old methods of moving around a directory structure are employed, these will be flagged by the report. These use ../ to move back through directory levels relatively. Ideally this wouldn't be the case and these should be updated if at all possible.

Sometimes bookmarks are set for particular parts of a page. The checker also looks for these and will let you know if any are broken.

So why not go and test to see if your website has any broken links?