Evaluation of website link checking software

Eugene F Burger
Pacific Marine Enironmental Lab, OAR

The cornerstone of the web is its distributed nature, and the ability of a web page to reference material on other pages through the use of hyperlinks. This flexibility of the web also poses one of its biggest challenges, which is to ensure that a link always points to the correct page. Preventing these broken links, or “link rot”, is an even bigger challenge on sites that may have thousands of links to other web sites.

Because of the time it would take to manually check links weekly, we looked at a number of commercial software products that automate this task. Our requirements were that the link checking software have a scheduler and the ability to scan multiple sites located on different servers. We found a number of link checking applications and installed demo versions of two of them: Web Site Monitor by HiSoftware and LinkScan by Elsop. The presentation will show the results of our evaluation of these two installations and describe how configurable the software is to OAR and our lab’s needs.