We’ve all been there – finding a link on our website that’s been broken for a couple of months and that has probably annoyed hundreds (if not thousands) of our visitors. Little annoyances like this can be enough for our visitors to get a feeling that we’re running a low quality website. What’s more, search engine spiders won’t love you for broken links either – you might get a small penalty for having broken links on your website, and you might be pushed down a bit in the search engine results.
Because of this it’s extremely important to make sure (every once in a while) that all the out-going links on your website actually work. I suggest you google for “xenu broken link finder” – the website looks a bit shady, but the software is really good and will check all your backlinks for you. It will actually check all links, images (including background images), frames, style sheets (CSS files), javascript files and java applets.