GMChost.com Webmaster Guide

Build Your Own Link Checking Service with Link Defender

Studies show that over 5% of links on the Web today are broken. That means if you have a web site with 200 links, 10 of them are most likely broken. Page names change and typographical errors are all too common. Even the best Webmasters are unable to predict when their links to third party sites will change or fail. The sad fact is that few links on the Web remain valid forever.

Some HTML editing tools include a simple link-checking feature. Unfortunately, most of these tools have significant shortcomings. Many only check the links on one page at a time after you've opened it in your editor. If you have dozens or even hundreds of pages to deal with, link checking becomes tedious.

Even worse, some links will appear to be valid when checked locally, but when uploaded to a Web site, they become broken. References to local files or uploading to the wrong location can cause links to become broken. A case sensitive Web server can also cause unexpected problems after uploading.

Think about how often you've left a site after encountering a "page not found" error. You immediately think that this is an unreliable place to do business. Most people will leave a site after encountering just one or two broken links. Not only that, but search engine spiders are also unable to find all your Web pages if the links to them are broken.

We looked around at various link-checking solutions this past year, but were turned off by the high fees charged by the better services. Most services charged a fee for every link checked each time you scheduled a scan. Monitoring our entire site daily for broken links would cost several hundred dollars or more per year at these services.

Realizing these problems, FirstPlace Software leveraged the fast, multi-threaded technology from WebPosition to develop a new tool called Link Defender. After running the tool for the first time, we were surprised to find more than two-dozen broken links scattered throughout our site! Now we run Link Defender every night on the scheduler. A report is automatically e-mailed to our Webmaster anytime a broken link is found, guaranteeing that our visitors will never suffer from dozens of broken links again. After all, every time a visitor runs into a "page not found" error, we're risking the loss of another sale.

We kept the product affordable to even the smallest of businesses by pricing it at just $49. The beauty of this solution is that you pay only once and can then run an unlimited number of link checks against your site. The Standard Edition supports up to 5 domain names with up to 500 pages each. The $99 Professional Edition will scan an unlimited number of domain names with an unlimited number of pages, as often as you like. Both versions support advanced features such as filtering, scheduling, local or online scans, and more.

The most intriguing feature of the Professional Edition is that it will let you start your own link checking business with minimal effort. You can customize the reports with your own company name and logo within seconds. If you have a client that wants his or her site scanned regularly for broken links, you simply enter their domain name into Link Defender. You can then specify the e-mail address to send the reports to so that you don't have to touch a thing after its set. You could then charge $19.95/month or whatever fee you deemed appropriate, normally based on the size of their site. Set the Link Defender mission to run daily, weekly, or monthly and you're all set.

With Link Defender, you can develop a reliable, reoccurring revenue stream with only a couple of minutes of work per client. After you bill your first $99, everything after that is profit.

You can use Link Defender to monitor your own Web site or scan your clients' sites. Either way, you can't beat Link Defender in terms of features and value. Please visit our site for a detailed feature list and free trial download.

This article is copyrighted and has been reprinted with permission from FirstPlace Software, the makers of WebPosition Gold. FirstPlace Software helped define the SEO industry with the introduction of the first product to track your rankings on the major search engines and to help you improve those rankings. A free trial of WebPosition Gold is available from their Web site.