LinkExaminer: SEO Friendly Link Scanning Utility

September 23, 2009 – 5:20 pm

I once compared 3 useful broken link checking tools and today it’s time that I share another great one:

LinkExaminer is a nice little tool that checks all the site links and have quite a few features useful for SEOs (many thanks to Mike Wilton for sharing it with us) .

To launch the tool:

Launch the application,
Under the menu Scan choose ‘Set URL‘,
Enter in your main URL,
Under the same menu click ‘Start’.

The tool will start scanning the site and compiling the data into a number of columns:

URL (The full URL of each page);
HTTP Code (based on this info each row will have different background color: red
indicates an error, green means everything is fine, and the shades of grey
(dark to light) mean there were some problems with crawling the link);
HTTP Message (simply the human-readable version of the HTTP code);
Internal (whether or not the link checker considers the link
internal or external to the site being scanned. What constitutes
internal links can be tweaked in the configuration);
Robots.txt content (whether or not a URL matches the criteria of a robots.txt
file. Depending on the configuration settings, these links may or may
not be examined);
NoFollow (whether or not a link contains the NoFollow attribute -
this tells the search engines not to index or assign any weight to the
link);
Dynamic (whether or not a link (or page) looks to be dynamically
generated. It’s also possible for a scripted page to be returning
static content to be considered dynamic);
Relative (whether or not a link was explicit, meaning it included
the full domain name, instead of just the path or a starting location
relative to where the user is on the site);
SEO (whether or not some basic SEO components are missing from
a page. Currently it checks to make sure that a page title, meta
keywords and meta description are all present – if they are not, then
it displays which are missing);
Title (this is either the text of the first link going into the page, or once
a page is harvested it becomes the title text from the page (if
available).
Depth (minimum number of links that need to be clicked on to get
to this particular page);
In (the number of inbound links pointing to this page);
Out (the number of outbound links on the page. Depending on config
settings this may include duplicates);
Content Type (This displays the Content-Type header returned by the webserver);
Page size (in K);
Last Modified (marked as modified by the server);
Link Type (what type of links are pointing to this page. For example,
if it was an image file, the link type might be CSS and IMG.)
Duration (time in seconds it took to get the page);
Similarity (how similar this page is to other pages, if similarity is
turned on).