The availability of a free broken link scanner is quite common on the internet. But the use of these scanners might give rise to certain anomalies which might seem to be at odds with what really is the truth. Some anomalies associated with these broken link scanners which are available free on the internet are:
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All WebPages not scanned
This happens when there is a limit set to the number of WebPages that can be scanned. In these free scanners, this limit is sometimes not explicitly mentioned and hence when the user tries to scan a website containing many pages, instances might occur when some of the WebPages do not get scanned.
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Links get omitted
The scanner when performing a broken link check on a website, the URL for which has been input in the relevant place, tends to skip certain links even though they are present on the website. This is because:
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- Incoming links are never discovered or acknowledged,
- Any change in the subdomain gets treated like a different site,
- Depth of the scan is limited to certain steps wherein links associated with pages which need to be traversed using more than the specified depth, will not get scanned, etc.
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Good Links reported as bad
There might be certain circumstances which might prevent the free dead link scanner from accessing certain websites or WebPages like:
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- Servers for those websites are located at a different geo-location or have different IPs or user agents and thus serve a different kind of content,
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- Some websites do not allow anything other than standard web browsers to access them,
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- Some invalid URLs get automatically corrected by a web browser empowered to do so and thus the scanner returns errors,
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- Some WebPages might take longer to open due to slow internet activity and hence get flagged as broken links by dead link scanners etc.
Thus to avoid such anomalies which have an effect on the results of the dead link scanner, it is important to avail the services of web auditing and maintenance companies like the Hexometer. These companies will not only provide accurate results but also ensure that the reported broken links get corrected.