Xenu’s Link Sleuth – Find 404 Broken Links on Any Website
As a web designer and administrator, there are certain routine “housekeeping” tasks that you have to perform with your server. These tasks can include data backup, traffic analysis, and server log audits. But there is one job that website administrators often fail to do, link checking. In this era of Web 2.0 and blogs where content has evolved from static and unchanging to dynamic and volatile, it is very important to make sure that your anchor tags (<a>) are intact.
Not only is link validation an important monthly routine task, it is a crucial, mission-critical operation when moving web servers or changing domain names. When I moved this website from http://freeware.art-app.com to http://www.freewarereview.info, it was literally hell in cyberspace. Even with my carefully hand-crafted .htaccess 301 redirects, my readership dropped and my server logs were filled with 404 error messages.
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