Xenu's Link Sleuth

Xenu's Link Sleuth: Free Website Audit Tool

Xenu's Link Sleuth is a free tool for checking websites for broken links, duplicate content issues, and other SEO problems. It crawls a site to find all links, images, and other assets and generates reports on any issues discovered.

What is Xenu's Link Sleuth?

Xenu's Link Sleuth is a veteran free software tool used for analyzing websites to identify SEO and accessibility issues. First released in 1997, it remains popular for its ability to thoroughly crawl a site and detect problems that may impact search engine visibility and user experience.

The tool crawls pages on a website looking for broken links, including those resulting in 404 or other HTTP errors. It also finds duplicate content issues across a site. The crawler analyzes page elements like images, CSS, scripts, and more to check if they are properly functional and following recommendations.

Beyond just crawling for links, Xenu's Link Sleuth generates extensive reports on what assets had problems. The reports support filtering and allow drill-down to pinpoint which pages have broken links or duplicates. Users can configure settings like crawl depth and scope to focus on parts of large websites.

While Xenu's interface shows its age, it remains robust and reliable after years of updates. It runs on Windows PCs and provides the detailed crawling capabilities of commercial alternatives without the expense. The extensive customization and filtering makes it useful for both developers and SEO analysts.

Xenu's Link Sleuth Features

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