One of the tools that’s a must have for any blogger or webmaster is a program that checks to make sure your links all work, and report the broken ones. I bought this program years ago for another project and just got the idea to run a report on this blog to check things out when I saw on another very high traffic blog that had several broken links. It’s virtually impossible to do it without a tool like this.

The scan of 1300 pages took about 20 minutes and I just had one bad link in the Antivirus article recently. HTML Link Validator can also check html pages on your hard drive as well as live sites and blogs. The interface is basic, but it’s a single purpose program, so it’s not really complicated. An alternative would be running a web log report to find errors, and I have Nihuo Web Log Analyzer that will show internal broken links like 404 errors, but it won’t catch external links to other sites that have broken. It cost $35 and was well worth it. They have a demo available here.