LinkAlarm – Review of Link Checking Software

LinkAlarm is a web-based link checking application that has been around for over 10 years and scans your web site checking each and every link on each web page. You can have LinkAlarm check your links once a week, once a month or you can run the scan manually whenever you like.

So the principle of LinkAlarm is straightforward enough, let’s see how it performs.

Signing Up

You can register for a free account, which is a 14 day trial that gives you enough credit (more on credit later) to check links on up to 100 pages.

Registering is easy enough, a few details about you (your name, email address and how you found LinkAlarm) and your web site (the URL, how often you would like to check – once only, weekly, every 2 weeks or monthly and the category of your web site).

Once you have registered you are presented with a screen with a welcome message, your site details and a further message saying that your site will be checked in 5 minutes and notification of the report will be emailed once finished.

I waited 5 minutes and nothing happened, no email. So I went back to the screen and read it again. It appears I had ignored some text that said ‘Please continue by confirming the entry of your site’ but there was no confirm site button and I had got confused. I clicked on the ‘Site Control’ link so see what that did and was presented with a page where it said ‘Checking’ in flashing green text. Good enough for me, I’ll leave it a little while and see what happens.

So, whilst that is running let me explain how the pricing structure of LinkAlarm works.

You pay for credits to be added to your account and then every time you run a report (either manually or automatically) LinkAlarm deducts 1 cent for each page of your web site. So if you have a 20 page web site you will pay 20 cents every time a report runs.

In my book that is pretty good value but is obviously more expensive for larger web sites and how often you want LinkAlarm to scan your site.

About half an hour later I received an email from LinkAlarm with the results and links to access more detailed reports online.

The Results

Within the email that LinkAlarm sends to you there is a section displaying your overall link check results. So my Testing Web Sites blog has 18 pages (still pretty small but growing) with a score of 64 and a failure of 3.7% (oh dear, really?). I had spotted that the category average for my web site is 2.5% so a failure percentage of 3.7% is a bit embarrassing and worrying. Let’s have a look at that in some more detail.

The email also gives you a number of statements (I won’t list them all here), which give you a quick impression of how well your web site performs in terms of internal links, external links and an overall score.

So, here are a couple of statements from the scan completed for www.testing-web-sites.co.uk, the comments are my comments relating to each statement:

Of the 18 pages checked, 18 (or 100%) were found to have one or more alarms.

Comment – so there is something broken on every page of my web site, great.

LinkAlarm checked 53 internal links and found 1 (or 2%) need attention.
Internal links are URLs that point to files inside your site.

Comment – there is 1 link that has a problem and it is probably on multiple pages, which is why I am getting such a high failure percentage.

LinkAlarm also checked 29 external links and found 2 (or 7%) need attention.
External links are URLs that point to files outside your site.

Comment – again, just 2 links that need attention but a high percentage because of the relatively low number of external links I have in place at present.

The LinkAlarm Score for this site (64) is an average of the page and alarm
ratios above. A score of 100 indicates all links checked reported no alarms.

Comment – I am guessing at the moment that a score of 64 is not great.

The link failure rate for this site (3.7%) is worse than
the benchmark link failure rate of 2.5% for the category – Computers & Internet.

Comment – I had spotted that too so will look into those failing links now to see what is wrong.

What the email from LinkAlarm also gives you is an understanding of what it would cost to run this report regularly on your web site plus links to their order form to order some credits. The costs are based on the number of pages and how often the report is run, for example, once each week. As I explained above the costs are based on 1 cent per page so if my web site stays at 18 pages then it would cost 18 cents to run each report or just under $10 each week for a year, not exactly big bucks.

It is helpful to know how much it is likely to cost to keep LinkAlarm checking my site but the only problem I have with this costing model is that I am aiming to grow my web site a lot over the next few months and so my costs to run LinkAlarm will continue to grow as the number of pages in my site increases.

So let’s have a look at the report now.

The Report

As mentioned in the email, the report gives you a summary first and the average for your category.

Then comes an Alarm Summary that shows the type of link failure for internal links, external links and total links. As you can see one of my internal links has a 405 error, which is Method Not Allowed. If you don’t know what this is then there is some handy help text available to give you an explanation.

405 Method Not Allowed means:
Common Alarm. Most commonly seen in ACTION links on FORMs where the server has not been configured to allow POST operations.

What you can do: Enable the ACTION for the correct location in your server configuration.

Clicking on the number of links shows me the pages that LinkAlarm found with the Method Not Allowed issue. This problem is being picked up on a PHP script relating to the posting of comments and is found on 7 of my 18 pages. At first glance this looks like an issue to do with my Wordpress blog or perhaps the theme that I am using, which will need further investigation and is unfortunately outside the scope of this review.

Now let’s have a look at the external links, the 2 errors are showing as 403 Forbidden. Again, some help text gives us a description of what that type of error is.

403 Forbidden means:
Common Alarm. The server will not provide the requested file. Commonly seen where content from an intranet has been made publicy available on the public internet or when your link points to a directory on a server and that server is configured to not provide directory listsings.

What you can do: Remove protection or provide and index file in the directory if necessary.

Both issues relate to links in the footer of each page of my blog, linking to the theme’s author. Clicking on those links manually does not result in a 403 Forbidden message but obviously LinkAlarm was getting that response.

So how does this happen? My view is that my theme’s author’s web site has some checking in place that works out if an automated bot is trying to access its pages and maybe responds with a different response code (403 in this case) than if my browser were trying to access the page.

This gives me a bit of a problem in trying to tidy up my LinkAlarm report because the software is going to think there are issues every time the report runs whereas in actual fact there does not appear to be any issues with the quality of my external links. This problem then is also not going to be restricted to just LinkAlarm but will extend to other link checking software too.

LinkAlarm, however, allows you to ignore certain pages or URLs and so you can maintain a list of any links such as the ones above. After ignoring the 2 external links that were producing incorrect 403 errors I ran the report again. This time I got a much more satisfactory result of 1.3% failure rate and an overall score of 86. There is now just that 1 internal link to investigate and deal with.

Other Features

It is worth detailing some of the other main features that you get as part of your LinkAlarm account, as follows:

History – shows you the history of the reports run with a graphic and summary information. Useful to see the improvement or worsening of your link check reports over time.

Download – you can download reports as zip files so you can keep copies of reports for later use.

Ignore URLS – as mentioned above.

Checking Limits – you can limit the number of pages that LinkAlarm checks if you want to. May be useful for larger sites that could stretch into hundreds or even thousands of pages.

Password Access – LinkAlarm can check password protected sites so useful for Intranets or web sites still in development.

Sites – the ability to add multiple sites to LinkAlarm so you can have it regularly checking all of your web sites using the same overall account. A good feature for agencies or larger companies who maintain a number of web sites.

Conclusion

Regularly link checking is a good thing and means that you are able to pick up on any link quality or linkrot problems at an early stage. Just the report run today on Testing Web Sites has raised some interesting items.

There is, however, only so much that any automated link checking software can do and this highlights the point about manually checking each and every link when you first complete an update to your web site or add a new page or blog post.

LinkAlarm is easy to set up and its free account enables you to start checking links very quickly. The ongoing costs are not great for smaller web sites but I wonder how LinkAlarm would perform for large, dynamic web sites such as an ecommerce site where they are potentially thousands of individual pages (although you can limit the number of pages or check specific pages if you want to).

The additional features that you get mean that LinkAlarm is worth considering for a wide variety of different companies and I will be continuing to use it unless I can find a better alternative.

Overall, I would recommend LinkAlarm for static web sites and possibly some further testing would be needed for larger and database driven web sites.