Tried that $15 website scraper tool for finding dead links on old directories

I was skeptical about this cheap scraper I found on a forum for pulling dead links from niche directory sites, but it actually caught 47 broken URLs on my gardening blog in under 10 minutes. It saved me from having to manually click through each page like I did last month for a different project. Has anyone else used one of these tools for cleaning up old link lists?

2 comments

2 Comments

ross.william16d ago

Funny you mention that, I tried a similar scraper for my woodworking site last month. It flagged 30 broken links but half were actually false positives from a plugin update. Still, beat the heck out of clicking through 200 pages myself.

richardharris16d ago

Yeah, false positives are a pain, but honestly I'd rather waste time checking a few bad hits than missing real broken links. The trick is to run the scraper twice with a week in between, then compare the results. If a link shows as dead both times, it's probably toast. I also always export the list to a CSV and spot check about 10 random ones before I bother cleaning up. That 10 minute time savings adds up fast when you're maintaining multiple sites.