It may sound strange, but the bookmarking service does not offer link validation options. Add to that missing options to verify links when they are added to the service, and it is guaranteed that broken links are becoming a major problem for regular users of the service.

Even worse is the fact that the Delicious staff has decided to block many link checking services from accessing their website. That may have been done to reduce the resource usage of the service. This guide looks at several options to verify links at the social bookmarking service.

Online Link Checkers

Online link checkers are the most comfortable option, as they can check the links of every public Delicious page easily and without additional software or plugins. The problem with this method is that many of the services are blocked by Delicious. It comes down to finding services that are not blocked. It has to be noted that only public links will be checked by the services, which may or may not be problematic. Another, more serious limitation is that only one page can be checked at the same time. Users with dozens or even hundreds of link pages at Delicious would need to verify each page individually.

The following online link checkers can currently be used to check links on delicious: Web Tools, 2bone Link Checker or Megrisoft Link Checker are two that are currently working. Just paste the Delicious url into the form and wait until the service has processed the page. The bad links will be marked, so that they can be identified easily. The last step then is to delete or edit the broken links on Delicious.

The online checkers are the best method for users with only a handful of bookmarks, and those who do not have access to software programs or browser add-ons that can also be used for verifying those links.

Software Link Verifiers

Users with hundreds of saved bookmarks at Delicious can optimize the verification process with software programs. Those programs often can check local and online HTML pages. It is recommended to export all Delicious bookmarks by clicking on Settings > Export / Backup Bookmarks on the Delicious homepage. This saves all bookmarks in a single HTML file on the local system. Software link checkers such as Link Sleuth or Deadlink can be used to verify all links on those exported HTML pages.

check links delicious

The verification looks the following in the Deadlink program. Start the link checker after installation, and select to verify links in an HTML file in the pulldown menu in the header. Now browse to the exported Delicious bookmarks file and load it into the application. A click on the green checkmark icon starts the verification of all bookmarks. It is again necessary to remove or edit any dead links manually at the Delicious website.

The main advantage of software link checkers is that they can process a single HTML file containing all exported bookmarks at once. This optimizes the verification tremendously.

Sync Bookmarks With Web Browsers

The third option makes use of browser add-ons or plugins to sync the Delicious bookmarks with the web browser bookmarks. It is then only necessary to verify the browser bookmarks regularly to eliminate dead links in the bookmarks.

Firefox users can download the official add-on Delicious Bookmarks, Google Chrome users the official Delicious Bookmarks Extension and Internet Explorer users the official Internet Explorer Add-On. All three browser extensions sync the bookmarks with the web browser.

The software programs mentioned in the Software Link Verifiers section of this guide can be used to verify those bookmarks easily.

Verdict:

It is not really clear why there is no official option to check Delicious bookmarks at the official website. One would expect a feature like that from a bookmarking service. Options to export and verify bookmarks with software programs, and to sync bookmarks with web browser bookmarks are probably the two best options to verify Delicious bookmarks on a regular basis.

Have you found another option to verify those bookmarks? Let us know in the comments.

Rarst reviewed the program AnalogX LinkExaminer yesterday which can verify all or only some of the links that are present on a domain. It starts by entering the main domain name or starting path. Several inclusion and exclusion filters are available to include or exclude links and parts of the website. It is for example possible to exclude external links completely or prevent that links with a certain phrase (e.g. tag or archive) are analysed by the software program. It is furthermore possible to use nofollow and robots.txt information.

The crawl rate and other related options like the depth of the scan or the maximum amount of links can be edited in the program’s options. The speed depends greatly on the Internet connection. Rarst mentioned that the program was able to scan 10 links per second. My mobile connection was not good for more than 1.4 links per second.

The results can be sorted by url, http code, http message, nofollow, internal links, robots.txt, dynamic links, relative links, titles or depth among other parameters. These information can be very useful for analysing links in general, especially for SEO purposes.

Various reports can be generated in the end including plain text list of links, csv data, xml sitemap data or a detailed html report.

AnalogX LinkExaminer is a highly customizable link verifier that provides enough information to make it interesting for SEOs as well. WordPress users who only want to check for broken links can use the WordPress Broken Link Checker plugin as an alternative. A software with a similar set of features is Xenu’s Link Sleuth (read: Check For Broken Links on Websites)

It is therefor essential for webmasters to regularly check the links that are posted on their websites and blogs to make sure that they are still pointing to the initial resource and do not return a 404 not found instead.

One of the best ways for WordPress webmasters is to install the WordPress plugin Broken Link Checker which will automatically check all posted links in all blog posts regularly to ensure that the links are valid. The initial lookup can take between a few minutes to several hours depending on the amount of posts and links on the blog. It took about 10 hours to find and check all links that have been posted at Ghacks.

The broken link count will be updated all the time and it is possible to deal with those links right away even if the plugin is still having links in the work queue. A click on the broken link count will open a table that displays 20 broken links per page.

The webmaster can display details about the link which will list the date of the link check and the error code that was returned. It is possible to delink right from the table which will remove the a tag from the link and keep the anchor name. Other possibilities are to exclude the link from future checks (good for false positives), to edit the url or to edit the post itself.

The plugin will automatically line-through broken links that have not been dealt with by the webmaster to inform visitors that the links are not working. The Broken Link Checker plugin is an excellent way of finding and removing broken links from a WordPress blog.

The broken links checker will automatically scan the Windows Start Menu for broken shortcuts. Each shortcut found to not working anymore will be displayed in its interface giving the user the option to delete them from the start menu.

Some or all of the broken shortcuts can be selected in the overview. A click on the finish button will delete all selected links from the Windows Start Menu. The software program will only delete the shortcuts and not the folders that they reside in.

It should be noted that popular system cleaners such as CCleaner are also capable of deleting broken shortcuts from the start menu. An easy way to delete empty folders in the Windows Start Menu is to use a program like Remove Empty Directories and point it to the path on the computer system that stores the start menu entries (Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\).

Websites with thousands of pages make it impossible to manually check links on each and every page. That’s where software programs like Xenu’s Link Sleuth come into play. The software is able to check all links on all pages of a website for broken links and reports them accordingly.

It naturally takes time to check thousands of pages and all the links that point from the to internal and external pages. The software takes good care of everything and offers enough options to configure the link checking process.

The webmaster can enter one or more urls that should get checked for broken links. Those are the starting points and the bot follows all internal links and level 1 external links he can find and reports on their status.

The report can be sorted by status which is also indicated by a color. Green usually means that the link is working while red indicates a broken link.

It is possible to get the properties of every broken link to be able to fix it by either removing it or replacing it with the correct one in case the website the link is pointing to has been moved.