Introduction to link checking in website maintenance
Hyperlink is the formal name of a link associated with keywords/images that lead to another location upon clicking on the text or the image. Most hyperlinks available on the internet websites generally have short half-lives and disappear for a variety of reasons listed at TechTarget. Clicking a hyperlink that has disappeared leads to the well known 404 error that flashes a message that the page is not found. Such links have been called "broken links".
Hyperlinks are an essential component of the World Wide Web (www). As websites age, the phenomenon of broken links may spread across the full content of a website, turning the search for information into a frustrating experience. Thus, the multiplicity of broken links is rightly called link-rot, implying decay and deterioration of the website.
To avoid link-rot within a website, website managers and webmasters should regularly check the validity of the links in their websites. To serve this need, many link checkers have been developed for various operating systems. The pages in this directory describe the installation and usage of Linkcheck for the Linux systems. The reason I selected Linkcheck is that it is the fastest of the link checkers available in the Linux world, and it is freely available to all.
The term "link checking" is also used by some websites that provide online security tools to check the safety of a single link. Example: IPVanish. Linkcheck described here is meant for wholesale examination of hyperlinks in a website.
The Linkcheck software described here can be used easily to check both internal and external links within a website.