Best Link Checker Tools for Online Security in 2023

Introduction 

Maintaining a healthy and optimized website is crucial for online success. One vital aspect of website management is monitoring and analyzing the quality and validity of its links. Broken or incorrect links can negatively impact user experience, search engine rankings, and overall website performance. Thankfully, there are several exceptional link checker tools available in 2023 that can help you identify and rectify these issues efficiently. In this blog post, we will understand what link checker tools are and also explore the best link checker tools for monitoring and analyzing your website’s performance.

What are Link Checker Tools?

Link checker tools are essential for monitoring and analyzing websites to ensure their performance, improve search engine optimization (SEO), and maintain a healthy online presence. These tools help identify broken links, dead links, and other potential issues affecting a website's user experience and search engine ranking. By using link checker tools, businesses can quickly identify and fix problematic links, enhancing their website's functionality and boosting their online visibility.

How does a link checker help improve your website’s performance? 

 Link checker tools perform various tasks, such as:

Checking for Broken Links: Link checker tools scan a website's pages to identify any links that lead to non-existent or inaccessible web pages. Broken links can negatively impact user experience and harm a website's SEO performance.

Verifying Link Validity: These tools validate the correctness of URLs by checking for syntax errors, missing protocols (http:// or https://), or improper characters. They ensure that all links are properly formatted and functional.

Analyzing Link Quality: Link checker tools evaluate the quality and relevance of both internal and external links on a website. They can provide metrics such as domain authority, spam score, and anchor text analysis to assess the overall health of a website's link profile.

Monitoring Link Changes: These tools can regularly scan a website's links and notify the user of any changes. They help identify newly created or removed links, as well as changes in anchor text or link destinations.

Reporting and Analytics: Many link checker tools generate comprehensive reports that summarize the findings of the link analysis. These reports can include metrics, charts, and recommendations for optimizing a website's link structure.

 By utilizing link checker tools, website owners can ensure that their website's links are functional, relevant, and contribute positively to user experience and search engine rankings. These tools play a crucial role in maintaining the overall health and performance of a website.

10 Best Link Checker Tools to boost your website performance in 2023

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a popular SEO tool that provides a comprehensive link checker solution. It helps analyze a website's backlink profile, identify broken links, and monitor new and lost backlinks. Ahrefs also offers a Site Explorer feature that enables users to explore their competitors' backlink profiles, giving them valuable insights to improve their own websites. 

‍

Key Features

• Shows you the number and quality of backlinks to any website or URL
• Shows you the domain and page-level metrics for any target, such as Domain Rating (DR), URL Rating (UR), referring domains, organic traffic, etc.
• Shows you the growth and decline of backlink profiles over time
• Shows you the most linked-to pages and the broken links on any website
• Shows you the outbound links and the anchor text used by any website
• Allows you to filter and sort the backlink data by various criteria, such as link type, platform, language, etc.
• Integrates with other Ahrefs tools, such as Site Explorer, Site Audit, Keywords Explorer, etc.

‍

Pricing

• Ahrefs offers a 7-day trial for $7, and its pricing plans start at $99 per month.

SEMrush

SEMrush is another well-known SEO tool that offers a robust link checker solution. It enables users to analyze their website's backlink profile, identify broken links, and monitor new and lost backlinks. SEMrush's Backlink Audit tool helps users identify potentially harmful links and remove them to maintain a healthy backlink profile. 

‍

Key Features

• Shows number and quality of backlinks, including the Authority Score metric
• Monitors growth and decline of backlink profiles over time
• Alerts when new backlinks are added or deleted
• Categorizes backlinks based on referring domain niches
• Provides information on anchor text used by linking websites and link type (followed or nofollowed)
• Allows filtering and sorting of backlink data by criteria such as domain score, URL score, and date
• Integrates with other Semrush tools like Site Audit, Keyword Gap, and Backlink Gap
• Helps find and fix broken links on your website or any other website.

Pricing 

• Pricing plans  start at $119.95 per month
• You can get two months free if you pay annually. You can also get a 7-day free trial.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a powerful website crawling tool that enables users to identify broken links, dead links, and other potential issues on their websites. It offers a desktop application called SEO Spider that crawls a website's links, images, CSS, and JavaScript to identify potential issues. 

‍

Key Features

• Screaming Frog has a user-friendly interface with data filtering, sorting, and export capabilities.
• To find broken links, navigate to the Response Codes tab and filter for Client Error (4xx) or Server Error (5xx) to identify URLs returning 404 or 500 errors.
• The tool displays the URLs with errors and their corresponding source URLs that are linked to them.
• Screaming Frog's export feature allows you to create spreadsheets or reports of broken links and redirects for tracking and fixing purposes.

Pricing

Screaming Frog also provides a free version that can crawl up to 500 URLs. 

The paid version starts at $139 per year.

Sitechecker

Sitechecker is an online link checker tool that helps monitor and analyze websites for broken links, SEO issues, and other potential problems. It offers a comprehensive website audit, including backlink tracking, keywords rank tracking, and SEO monitoring. 

‍

Key Features

• External Link Checker: Checks outbound links for functionality, relevance, and authority. Provides comprehensive data for each URL, including anchor text, status code, dofollow/nofollow attribute, and more.
• Broken Link Checker: Identifies and helps fix dead or broken links on your website. Scans both internal and external links and reports error codes. Offers filtering options by page, status code, anchor text, etc.
• Link Strategy: Researches competitors' link building strategies and discovers new opportunities. Analyzes backlinks of any domain, showcasing sources, anchors, domain rating, and more. Allows for a comparison of backlink profiles with competitors.
• Backlink Tracker: Monitors backlinks, detecting lost or non-indexable links. Measures the impact of each backlink on SEO performance, including traffic, conversions, and bounce rate. Integration with Google Analytics and Google Search Console available.
• On-Page Checker: Conducts quick on-page SEO analysis for any page, detecting errors in text content, links, images, meta tags, and page speed. Provides specific recommendations for improvements to enhance SEO score.

Pricing 

• Sitechecker provides a free version that scans up to 300 web pages, 
• Paid plans start at $49 per month.

W3C Link Checker

W3C Link Checker is an online tool that checks websites for broken links and other potential issues. It examines the issues in links, anchors, and referenced objects throughout a website. Users can set restrictions on how deep the tool goes while checking the website. W3C Link Checker is an easy-to-use tool that provides immediate and effective results.

Key Features

• The W3C Link Checker can validate links and anchors in web pages or full websites.
• It offers both online and local installation options as a Perl module. 
• It has the ability to identify broken links, redirects, duplicate content, and other issues.
• The tool can handle HTTP basic authentication and various document types.
• It provides a summary of the results and presents a list of the detected issues.
• It can check error pages and perform markup cleanup using HTML-Tidy.
• The W3C Link Checker is a component of the W3C's validators and quality web tools.

Pricing 

W3C Link Checker is a free tool. 

Dr. Link Check

Dr. Link Check is an online link checker tool that scans websites for broken links and offers detailed information about their URL history and potential issues. The tool checks all internal and external links on a website and provides a summarized report of the results. 

‍

Key Features 

• Scans internal and external links and reports error codes.
• Can filter results by page, status code, anchor text, etc.
• Export results to CSV.
• Checks outbound links against blacklists for phishing or malware content.
• Uses Google Safe Browsing, PhishTank, and other sources.
• Detects links with a 200 OK code but problematic content.
• Runs automatic link checks on a schedule (monthly, weekly, daily).
• Receives status reports via email.
• Configures crawl speed, URL rules, and recipients for each check.
• Analyzes HTML and CSS code of any page on your website.
• Finds mistakes in text content, links, images, meta tags, and page speed.
• Provides specific tips for fixing issues and improving SEO score.

Pricing 

• Dr. Link Check offers a free version that scans up to 1,000 links.
• Paid plans start at $10 per month.

Dead Link Checker

Dead Link Checker is an online tool that systematically detects dead links on a website. It offers three modes of operation: Site Check, Multi Check, and Auto Check. Dead Link Checker can filter URLs using wildcards and scan multiple links simultaneously.

Key Features 

• It can check your entire website or a specific page for broken links.
• It can run multiple checks simultaneously and send you the reports via email.
• It can schedule automatic checks on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
• It can highlight broken link building opportunities by finding the most linked-to dead pages on your site or your competitors’ sites.
• It can export the data in CSV format for further analysis or outsourcing.

Pricing 

• It's a free tool, but the number of pages you can scan is limited in the free version. 
• Paid plans start at $9.95 per month.

Link Assistant by SEO Powersuite

Link Assistant by SEO PowerSuite is a software tool that helps you find and manage link partners for your website. It is part of the SEO PowerSuite bundle, along with Rank Tracker, SEO Spyglass, and WebSite Auditor. 

‍

Key Features 

• It can find link prospects based on keywords, URLs, or various search methods.
• It can analyze the quality and relevance of each link partner and assign them a Link Value score.
• It can contact link partners via email and track the status of each outreach campaign.
• It can verify the live status of each backlink and detect any changes or problems.
• It can generate and upload link directories to your website or export them in various formats.

Pricing

• Link Assistant provides a free version with limited functionality 
• Paid plans start at $299 per year.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools, now called Google Search Console, is a web-based service that helps users analyze and optimize their website's performance on Google Search. It verifies whether Google can access a website's content, indexes new pages, and removes unwanted content. Google Webmaster Tools also provides insights on indexing and crawling activities made by the search engine to a website. 

‍

Key Features 

• Search Traffic: Analyze queries that bring users to your site, and track impressions, clicks, and Google Search position.
• Index: Submit sitemaps and URLs for crawling, review index coverage, and remove unwanted URLs from Google's index.
• Enhancements: Optimize the site for user experience and search results with features like mobile usability, breadcrumbs, sitelinks search box, logos, and more.
• Security & Manual Actions: Receive email alerts for security issues or manual actions such as hacking, malware, spam, or unnatural links.
• Links: View external and internal links to your site, top linking sites, and pages.
• URL Inspection: Inspect crawl, index, and serving information for any URL on your site, request live test or index update from Google Index.

Pricing

• It is a free tool. 

Broken Link Checker for WordPress

Broken Link Checker for WordPress is a free plugin that automatically checks a website for broken links and notifies users through the WordPress dashboard. It monitors internal and external links in posts, pages, comments, custom fields, and more. The plugin also allows users to edit or unlink broken links directly from the plugin's page, without manually updating each post.

‍

Key Features 

• Monitors posts, pages, comments, and custom fields for broken links and missing images
• Sends email or dashboard notifications upon detecting broken links
• Highlights broken links in posts for easy identification
• Prevents search engines from following broken links to avoid negative SEO impact
• Offers search and filter options for broken links by URL, anchor text, or status
• Allows direct editing or unlinking of broken links from the plugin page, eliminating the need to visit each post
• Provides a choice between two link checking engines: cloud-based or local

Pricing

• It is a free tool. 

Factors to Consider When Choosing the Best Link Checker Tool

When choosing the best link checker tool, consider factors such as:

1. Ease of use: The tool should be easy to use and understand, with a user-friendly interface and clear instructions.

2. Features and functionalities: Look for a tool that offers a range of features and functionalities, such as broken link detection, backlink analysis, website crawling, and SEO analysis.

3. Compatibility: Ensure the tool is compatible with your website's platform and can scan both internal and external links.

4. Pricing: Consider the cost of the tool and whether it offers a free version or affordable pricing plans to suit your budget.

5. Customer support: Opt for a tool backed by a reliable customer support team to address any technical issues that may arise.

Conclusion 

In conclusion, using link checker tools is essential for monitoring and analyzing your website's performance, improving SEO, and maintaining a healthy online presence. These tools help identify broken links and other potential issues affecting a website's user experience and search engine ranking. By using link checker tools, businesses can quickly identify and fix problematic links, enhancing their website's functionality and boosting their online visibility. Choose a tool that suits your needs and budget, ensuring it offers a range of features and functionalities to help you maintain a healthy website and stay ahead of the competition in 2023. You can also sign for a free 7-day trial with Scalenut to optimize your website content. 

About Scalenut 

Scalenut is an AI-powered SEO and content marketing platform that helps discover and create relevant content for your customers. Be it brainstorming a content strategy, creating comprehensive briefs, generating the content, or optimizing it per the best SEO practices, Scalenut has made the process extremely easy. Click here to create a free account and explore the many features of this tool.