A Review of Xenu's Link Sleuth

Xenu's Link Sleuth, the flippantly-named link checker, is a widely used application that quickly identifies broken links along with tons of other information that will make your life much easier as you're promoting your website. Its native compatibility is with Windows, but it also works under Crossover on Macs and Wine on Linux. Best of all, it's a freeware application that is extremely well-designed and easy to use.

So what does it do?

Checks for Broken Links – The most obvious function of this program is to spider through your site, check out broken links (both outbound and internal), and report back to you. Regardless of Google rank, a site that's rife with broken links is a site that will see a sharp decrease in visitors. Running this program every once in a while will keep you on top of any broken links so you can fix them before the users even notice.

Look for Duplicate Content – In the SEO world, duplicate content is a major sin. Xenu can squirrel through your pages looking for broken links, but all it takes to see if you have any duplicate titles is to sort the pages by title! Now you have a list to help squeeze that extra bit of optimization out of each page.

View Outbound Links – Too many outbound links can make your website look like a link farm or simply difficult to navigate. You can keep an eye on how many pages have outbound links with one of the sorting options and make any changes as necessary.

View Internal Links – This sorting feature allows you to see which pages have the most internal links, helping you monitor the flow of your website.

Sort Pages by Depth – Sorting pages by their level allows you to see how deeply buried some of your content is. In conjunction with the outbound links and internal links, you can generate a mental map of how you need to reorganize your website to allow easy access to all of the pages. Doing so assists with your SEO efforts by making what you've done more effective as the user can actually find the pages you want them to see.

Analyze Image Data – A slow and clunky website is just as bad as a quick website that's hard to navigate. In either case, the user becomes frustrated and will move on to another site. Xenu can sort your images by size (allowing you to reduce the bandwidth load by removing pictures), and it can also check for images without Alt-text. Alt-text is a great way to throw in some more content and pull in more people through Google Image Search, so run through the empty images and add some text.

What's the final verdict?

Xenu's Link Sleuth is an excellent piece of software, and it will save your most precious resource: time. There's absolutely no reason to neglect this fantastic tool because it will save you from a tedious time-sink of a job.

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