Link Check - Link Checker Validators

Checking a website for broken links is important to a website's success. If the web page/website contains broken links the search engine spiders will not find the page refered to and your website's credibility could be damaged when the visitor continually finds broken links. In this article you will learn to validate links with link checkers and how to use link check validators to produce web pages and websites that do not contain broken links using a link check validator.

What Link Check Validators Do

Link check validators (also known as Link Checker validators) check that the web page links (hypertext links) work correctly (that there are not any broken links within the web page/website).

If your web page links do not validate then the page contains dead links (links that do not work correctly i.e. broken links). Use one of the many link check validators available to validate links for each web page in the website. The length of time to required to check links in a website will depend on how many links are contained in the site.

Link Check Validators Available

There are various Link Check validators available on the net. I use and recommend the W3C's free validation services to validate links.

You can validate links by using the url of the page.

Using the W3C's Link Checker Services

Note: Before validating links with the Link Checker validator you have to validate the HTML coding.

Enter the url of the site for W3C's Link Checker to check.

Next, click the Check button.

It may take quite a while for the Link Checker results page to completely appear, depending on how may links your web page contains.

Scroll down the page to the Results section.

If all the links in the page/site work correctly then under Links you will see "Valid Links!". Congratulations, all your links are working correctly.

Link Checker Found Broken Links!

If you see the message "List of broken links and redirects" then the Link Checker validator found that there are broken links.

Look below this message and there will be a list of broken links. The error(s) list contains the broken links the Link Checker found.

Now you have the task of going through the pages that refer to the broken link(s) and correcting them or deleting them if the site is no longer available.

You may have some links that have "The link was not checked due to robots exclusion rules. Check the link manually." This happens because the site owner has something in their robots.txt file denying access. As the message says, you will have to check these links manually.

Related Validation Articles

If you found this web page a useful resource for your own website please link as follows:

HTML Basic Tutor - www.htmlbasictutor.ca/

Learn to validate links with link checkers. How to use link check validators. Produce web pages and websites that do not contain broken links using a link check validator.
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