How to detect and remove dead links?

Dead links are links that points to web pages that can't be found. These are bad for your website since it can portray an image of a not managed or outdated site. The moment you find a dead link in your pages, you should remove it as soon as possible.

Knowing that you have a dead link is a good starting point. Now all you have to do is to find that anchor text that points to the dead link and edit/remove it.

Now the problem is how do you find a dead link? Here are some free tools that can help you in your search for dead links.

Google Webmaster Tools

I have been using this recently and found its features very useful. You can use Google Webmaster Tools to give a diagnostic test on you blog. Checking for dead links is one of the many features you can find while using this tool. As you can see from the screenshot, it reports to have found 2 "not found" errors and a link to the details is also given. Note that not found errors are synonymous to dead links. The details page shows you the address where the dead link points too.

However, my problem here is that, I could not find the anchor link that points to the dead link's address. If you do know how to find it using Google Webmaster Tools, please let me know.

Xenu's Link Sleuth

This software claims to find broken links on your site. Basically, what the program does is act like a search engine spider and scan all the links starting from your input page (usually the homepage). You can opt to let it include external links (links outside your domain) or just internal links (links within the domain).

If you are having a hard time understanding what I just said, think of a tree. Now imagine the trunk of the tree as your "input page" or homepage, and the stems are the links. The links branches out just like a tree.

All you have to do is input a page, click "OK" and wait for the software to finish. It will generate a report for you to browse through with lots of details. It is a very handy tool to find the pages the link to dead links and remove them.

Removing the dead links is currently a problem for my other blog. I have searched manually, used both tools but I could not find the anchor text that causes the dead link. For now, I am waiting for the next time Google crawls my site. (Google Webmaster Tools is able to you when Google last crawled your site)