How to detect broken links in SharePoint 2010

I’ve been doing some digging over the last week as to an easy / free way to detect broken links in SharePoint 2010. This approach uses Google Analytics for the SharePoint site whether external or internal facing. To setup Google Analytics for SharePoint  see my previous blog explaining how to implement this.

So the next step is to add the code supplied from Google here to the SharePoint 404 page. This will track how many times the page was hit and also the referring page (the Google article explains this in more detail). It is worth noting that for the code to run requires the client pc’s to have internet access, SharePoint servers do not.

The downside to this approach is that you have to wait for users to actually hit the page before knowing where the broken links are, therefore this scenario may not be ideal for every scenario as you may want to find broken links before your users do!

From a brief scan of the internet another tool worth looking at is the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit which can be downloaded here and can be installed on client pc’s to avoid server installs. A blog by Tristan Watkins of using this with SharePoint can be seen here.

2 comments:

Tendero said...

Hi
found one at www.qipoint.com, scans and reports broken links in csv format, its a console app that we batch script, however it has to be run on sharepoint server... but we prefer that than installing something.. hope that helps someone else out there!

Unknown said...

Great article! It helped me a lot! Thanks for sharing!
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