Are you a small business owner with a website? Does your website link to other websites? If so, you might want to use a link checker to make sure all the links to other sites are working.

Surely you’ve surfed around the Internet and clicked on a link that didn’t work.

This might be because a server isn’t responding or maybe the information has been removed. Companies sometimes rearrange their websites or stop selling products, which then get removed from their site. When you have links to these missing pages, visitors to your website aren’t able to get the full value of the content you’ve provided.

This is when link checker apps come in handy. There are many different link checking programs out there, including some that are entirely web-based. At Sound Support, we use a free link checker called Integrity.

The first Friday of every month, I run Integrity to see what links have broken on soundsupport.biz. Inevitably, I find some links that need to be fixed. Usually fixing the broken link involves going to the original website, finding the new location of the information and updating my link. When the information is no longer available I remove the broken link from our website. Usually when I remove a link I’ll make some notation such as “Update:” and some message about what has changed.

There are also a handful of links that are reported as being broken, but aren’t actually broken. That’s one of the downfalls of a link checker. For instance, Integrity doesn’t have access to Tim’s Facebook login, so every mention of his Facebook page shows up as an invalid link even though when I click on it, the page opens right up. Some websites take more than a few milliseconds to open, so those can sometimes be incorrectly reported as invalid as well. The most important point here is making sure to check all links reported as broken so that they can be fixed if they are actually broken.