CODEWITHSUNDEEP
drupal
Daniel Cayouette
Daniel Cayouette

Reputation: 31

How to mechanically identify all broken links in a drupal site

We have just moved to drupal and are trying to pro-actively identify all broken external web (http://, https://) links.

I've seen some references to validation of links but wasn't sure if it only meant validation of the syntax of the link as opposed to whether these web links work or not (e.g. 404).

What is the easiest way to go through all web links in a drupal site and identify all of the broken external web links? This is something we'd like to automate and schedule every day/week.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 3737

Answers (2)

Christopher Cooper
Christopher Cooper

Reputation: 1920

As someone else mentioned, use Link Checker module. It's a great tool.

In addition, you can check the Crawl errors in Google Webmaster tools for 404'd links like this: Google Webmaster Tools check crawl errors

Clicking any URL from there will show you where the URL was linked from so you can update any internal broken links. Be sure to use canonical URLs to avoid that.

Make sure you're using a proper internal linking strategy to avoid broken internal links in the first place, too: http://www.daymuse.com/blogs/drupal-broken-internal-link-path-module-tutorial

Essentially: use canonical, relative links to avoid broken internal links in the future when you change aliases. In simple Drupal terms, be sure you're linking to "node/23" instead of "domain.ext/content/my-node-title" since multiple parts of that might change in the future.

Upvotes: 3

River Liver
River Liver

Reputation: 83

I have not found a Drupal based approach for this. The best, free piece of software I've found for finding bad links on sites is Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool.

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

Upvotes: 1

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