Xenu Link Sleuth: a tool for express audit of your website. An overview

You can download the Xenu installation file from its official site at home.snafu.de. Even though its last build dates back to 2010, the program still runs smoothly and is  a useful tool for those working on developing their own web projects.

The only possible downside of Xenu for some users is that exporting reports as tables is not supported.

After installing and starting the program, you will see a minimalistic UI window.

To start a new project, go to File > Check URL.

Paste your project URL in the next window.

The Check external links checkmark means that the program will scan external (outbound) links.

If you want to leave out some links, such as subdomains or mirrors, from the external link profile, list URLs that should be considered internal in the Include/Exclude box.

You can also exclude whole directories from the scanning process if they are too extensive or if you decide to divide the process into several stages.

You can set up additional scanning parameters in the Options menu. For example, let’s tick the type of reports we need in the Basic section.

1. Broken links, ordered by link — broken hyperlinks grouped according to their URLs.

2. Broken links, ordered by page — broken hyperlinks grouped according to pages on which they are located.

3. Broken local links — broken internal links.

4. Redirected URLs — addresses that signal 301 or 302 redirects.

5.  Ftp and gopher URLs — FTP and non-HTTP/HTTPS protocols.

6.  Valid text URLs — working text links.

7.  Site Map — a site map in XML format.

8.  Statistics — provides statistics.

9.  Orphan files — lost files (those that don’t have any links leading to them from any of the site’s documents). The program will request an FTP-access to a server to search for them.

When the scanning process finishes, you will see this window.

Click on Yes, and the report will open locally in a browser window.

Xenu creates an HTML page with reports that you specified in the options.

Using that data, you can find problems with your website’s optimization, even serious ones.

Types of errors that can be tracked down in reports

1. Finding and removing links that no longer work.

Over time , information on your site turns obsolete, and some links become broken when pages, images, or documents (whether on your site or external) get deleted. A large number of non-working links signals to a search engine that this site is neglected and that its content might not be meaningful anymore. Besides, broken URLs always create a bad user experience.

Xenu will find all links that no longer work, including those that lead to service files or design elements.

Check these reports:
— Broken links, ordered by link
— Broken links, ordered by page
— Broken page-local links

2. Checking which links are redirects.

Redirects are often used in SEO to merge duplicate URLs or deleted pages with new ones so as not to lose any visitors. However, internal URLs are not maintained that well, and they are often left as they are when creating redirects. At the same time, for a search engine, many active redirects is another signal that this website is not being kept up to date.

Check this report:

— List of redirected URLs

3. Getting a list with all the pages on your site and visualizing its structure.

A list of all available pages will help to create a correct logical structure of your site and find URLs with a high level of nesting. If you find important information on a level 4 or 5, then you should think about optimizing your site’s navigation.

Check these reports:
— List of valid URLs you can submit to a search engine
— Site Map of HTML pages with a Title

4. Creating your site map in HTML.
Xeno will create a site map that conveniently eliminates a lot of manual labor for some small static websites.

Check this report:
— Site Map of HTML pages with a Title

5. Finding non-unique titles.

Duplicating browser headers is a critical error in site optimization. For search engines, ‘title’ remains one of the key signals about the contents of a page. If a page has several URLs with the same header, a search engine has to randomly decide which one best suits a query, and this negatively impacts the ranking of a whole site.

Check this report:
— Site Map of HTML pages with a Title

6. Getting express statistics for your site.

This report has your site’s statistics, showing types of data, response codes, and the size of processed code.

Check this report:
— Statistics for managers

Meanwhile, the list of all scanned URLs and their parameters will be left available in the main window.

1. Address — page URL
2. Status — scan status (page availability during scanning)
3. Type — content type
4. Size — the size of data sent
5. Title — browser header
6. Date — date of update (not always present)
7. Level — level of nesting
8. Out Links — outbound links
9. In Links — inbound links
10. Server — server type
11. Error — error description
12. Duration — the time of response
13. Charset — character set
14. Description — meta-description

Unfortunately, this information can’t be exported to a spreadsheet editor of your choosing, but you can work with it directly in the program window, which supports column sorting.

What you can learn from the collected data

1. Find pages with the most and the least amount of internal links.

You can use this data when interlinking your site. The most important pages should have the largest number of inbound links.

To view all internal connections of a page, right-click on a URL and select URL properties.

2. Find pages with long response time or server errors.

You will have to correct your site’s configuration or delete wrong links.

3. Find outbound links to other sites.

URLs of these sites will be shown in the first column along with your URLs.

Third-party sites can be used for fraudulent purposes, including linking to malicious content. Check whether those links were really added by you.

4. Find images that don’t have an ‘Alt’ attribute.

If your site has a lot of unique graphic content, then image search can bring you a lot of traffic. To make sure that users can find your site, fill the ‘Alt’ attribute of all images with an appropriate description.

You can see filled attributes and find empty ones by sorting by content type.

Despite the considerable age of Xenu, it remains a great tool to make a quick audit of moderately sized sites, even though a number of other similar tools have appeared since its release.

Xenu is fast and easy to use—and, of course, free. However, its main disadvantages are the inability to work with large sites and the absence of an export function.