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Xenu generates reports both in its own file format and in text format for further export to Excel. Xenu Link Sleuth - what is this program How to use the xenu program

Xenu Link Sleuth This is one of the most useful (and at the same time free) tools in search engine optimization. Although this program was originally intended to search for broken links on a site, it can be used to solve a number of other problems by auditing the internal structure of the site and finding weak points in it:

– Look for broken (broken) links on a given resource.
You have written a hundred articles, many of them had links to other resources or some documents or images, but it is impossible to manually monitor the functionality of all these links. In this case, it is very convenient to use Xenu Link Sleuth, as free software, easy to configure and use.

– Create a site map.
For dynamic sites, creating a sitemap is not a problem, however, for static HTML resources, creating a sitemap manually is very time-consuming and labor-intensive. Xenu solves this problem in a few minutes, depending on the size of the site and the speed of the Internet connection.

– Look for pages with a long response time.
Knowing which pages on your website are rendered with a long delay, you can analyze the reason for this behavior and optimize the render time, which will have a positive effect on both visitors and search engines.

– Find non-unique titles.
Each title on the page must be unique, then none of them will appear in additional search results and be filtered as duplicate content. Therefore, it is important to know on which pages of the site titles are repeated.

– Find pages with a high level of nesting.
If possible, all pages on the site should be located no further than two or three clicks from the main page. The further away a page is, the more difficult it is for both users and search engines to reach it. If you find similar pages that are important, but located more than 3 clicks from the main page, it is worth taking some measures to improve navigation. You may no longer need some of the distant pages; xenu makes it easy to find them.

– Search for pages with the maximum number of outgoing links.
As mentioned earlier, all outgoing links on the site must be carefully moderated, since well-deserved trust from search engines depends on them (according to the principle: “Tell me who your friend is and I will tell you who you are!”) as well as the assignment of various kinds of filters to the site. If you notice a sharp drop in search engine rankings, then the first thing you need to do is check all outgoing links, since it is possible that if it is not you, then the hackers who posted their spam links on your resource.

– See which pages have the largest and smallest number of internal links to themselves.
Check your internal linking numerically. Which pages deserve more attention and which deserve less (based on internal links)?

– Find pictures with a missing alt attribute.
The alt attribute is important when optimizing a site or individual pages for specific queries. Check if you may have missed a description for images that are important on your site, adding which will improve your search rankings or you will be found by search by images.

The results of solving these problems, as you can see, can be used for optimization, therefore, let’s do a short review of the program Xenu Link Sleuth, so that its users are not intimidated by the English interface.

Xenu is a free product and this program can be downloaded from this link. When you launch, a very simple window will open in front of you, the important part of which is shown in the screenshot.

To start auditing a site, select the menu item “File » Check URL”. In the window that appears, you must enter the site address and select the “Check external links” checkbox.

The program has many settings available in the menu item “Options » Preferences”.

Parallel threads sets the number of synchronous (parallel) requests.
Apply to all jobs allows you to save settings for all projects.

Further, the report allows you to include:
Broken links, ordered by link - Broken links, sorted by address;
Broken links, ordered by page - List of broken links, sorted by page;
Broken local links - Broken internal links;
Redirected URLs - Addresses with 301/302 redirect;
Ftp and gopher URL s - FTP and other non-HTTP addresses;
Valid text URL s - List of working text links;
Site Map - Site map;
Statistics - Statistics;

The Xenu report file is very large and contains all the necessary information. For example, monitoring statistics for this blog showed the following results:

As a result of the audit, a number of points were found on the site that are worth paying attention to for optimization. The only drawback of the program is the display of Russian page titles in the wrong encoding.

Immediately after checking the site links, a detailed table will appear in the main window, where the data can be sorted by each of the columns: link address, return status, mime type, size, title, nesting level, number of external and internal links, time page returns. This is the table you need to use.

Today I want to consider the issue of the technical component of our sites, and I invite everyone to look under the “hood” of their site or blog. Is everything really as good as it seems at first glance with your website? Let's talk about the Xenu program, which will help you find broken, outgoing and other unusable links on your resource.

Xenu program - we conduct a technical audit on the site

Hello, I completely disappeared and stopped working on my blog. I'm getting more and more involved in working with commercial sites. I’ll take advantage of a short break and share the useful Xenu program for Webmasters, which has helped me out more than once. I have been working with it for quite a long time and constantly use it in practice.

Using the Xenu program you can find all outgoing and broken links on your site.

Let me briefly tell you an interesting incident that happened a few months ago. One of the sites I work on, an online store in particular, was hacked. My colleague, many thanks to her, noticed suspicious links to other sites in several product cards. These links cannot be present on our resource in any way, since we use it for clients. We immediately launched Xenu, this site has quite a lot of pages, so the verification takes about 1-2 hours.

At the end of the check, we found about 20 outgoing links, including to 18+ sites and online casinos. We also managed to identify the attacker, since he left an outgoing link to himself. Yes, there is such an exchange on the Internet that sells links from hacked sites, perhaps some people have heard about it.

As a result, we cleaned everything up, also found a couple of interesting scripts and changed the passwords. The consequences were not very noticeable, but they lost a little traffic on Google, since they reacted after about a week... Let's move on to practice.

Checking outgoing and external links

Based on the story I told you, if you suspect that something is wrong with your resource (for example, loss of positions or traffic), I advise you to periodically run your website or blog using this program. You can even do this now, for prevention purposes, with me.

The first thing we'll look at is how to detect external links. You can download Xenu from this link, a program for checking external links.

1. Launch the program, enter the address of our website and click OK.

We are waiting for the robot to run through all our pages. Depending on how many pages you have, scanning lasts from a few minutes to several hours.

2. Once the robot has crawled all the pages, we see a list of various links that are present on our resource. To make it easier to see and find outgoing links from your site, we sort the links by the "Address" field. We look at the beginning of the list and the end, and here are our external links.

3. In order to quickly find the pages from which an external link is placed, you need to right-click on the “bad” link and select “URL properties”.

Looking for broken links on a site with Xenu

Now let's check if there are broken links on the site that give 404 code and how to find them. The main reason for the appearance of such links is that the address (URL) of the page to which the link leads has changed or the page has been deleted, but the link remains. There are also other reasons.

With this sorting, you can also find the links through which the redirect occurs, which is also very useful.

I told you the main two points about finding external and broken links on a website using Xenu. The program is free and, as far as I know, is already quite old and is not updated, but for us the main thing is that it works.

I also use this program during my “first acquaintance” with the site I’m starting to work on.

That's all, if you have other interesting software on this topic, share it in the comments!

Xenu is the abbreviated name for the Xenu’s Link Sleuth program, designed for internal site audit and search for broken links.

When site structure or URLs change, other pages may still have stale links that point to old, non-existent addresses. It is the search for such links that is the main task of Xenu. The program is free, which is why it is very popular all over the world. This is a simple software that allows you to quickly analyze a site for broken links and more.

Xenu Features

In addition to searching for broken and broken links, the program can:

  • search for images, frames, scripts, plugins, styles, etc.;
  • look for pages with long response times;
  • look for pages with high weight;
  • look for pages with a high level of nesting;
  • analyze internal linking;
  • search for identical Title headings;
  • search for images without an alt attribute;
  • create a site map;
  • check protected sites using the SSL protocol (https://).

Xenu is capable of analyzing both the entire site and its individual pages. It is also possible to analyze local documents on a PC.

During the analysis process, the results will be displayed in the main window. In the future, they can be exported, for example, to Excel.

How the program works

To start analyzing a site in Xenu, you need to launch the software and click on the File tab. Next, select the first item Check URL.

We indicate the address of the site, individual pages or the path to the document on the PC.

After launch, the analysis results will be displayed in the main program window. Both page URLs and links to various files will be analyzed.

Using various tabulators, you can sort links according to different parameters: Status (broken or not), Type (file format), Size (page size), Title (header) and Level (nesting level).

XENU Link Sleuth 1.3.8 – download a free program for detecting “broken” links on a website. The program is intended primarily for web developers who create and test websites, as well as for SEO specialists.

When developing websites, and then when promoting them, you need to test them for the presence of so-called “broken” links that can appear on the site over time. First of all, the presence of broken links has a bad effect on the user experience of the site, and secondly, sites with broken links are ranked worse, that is, they are located lower in the search list than sites that do not have them. Therefore, to analyze the entire site, special software is required, since it is not possible to do such work manually. This is exactly what XENU Link Sleuth is designed for.

Description of the XENU Link Sleuth program

This software has a common interface that allows you to simply and reliably “communicate” with the program. It's not designed to provide any visual satisfaction, but it gets the job done.

In order to check “broken links” on the site, you need to go to the “Check URL” item in the top menu of the XENU Link Sleuth program. Then, a modal window will open in which you need to enter the appropriate link to the site in the “URL” field. You must enter the link carefully, without an access protocol, that is, without “http://”, but only the site address. Here, you are given the opportunity to check not only internal, but also external links. To do this, you need to check the box in the appropriate field.

Also, in this window there is a button with additional options. It allows you to customize the site crawling process. For example, you can set the number of simultaneous threads that will check links. This allows you to increase the productivity and speed of the program. Also, you can specify the depth of link checking levels, and so on.

After all the settings, click “OK” and wait for the scanning to finish. As a result, you get a list of all links on the site, where working links are marked in green and not in red. After this, you need to review and resolve the problem manually or with the help of your webmaster.

Good day! Last week I returned from the village, where I spent an unforgettable time of complete relaxation! The weather was excellent; we spent days on end in rivers, lakes, forests, and fields. Fresh air and not a soul around - this is real relaxation!

We continue to study the topic of blog optimization on WordPress. Previously, we examined in detail the issue of checking a site both manually and using a plugin. Today we will dwell in detail on 2 desktop programs that perform these tasks automatically, and we will analyze their basic settings and technical audit parameters. These are Xenu’s Link Sleuth and Netpeak Spider, free tools for blog SEO analysis.

How to use the Xenu program.

Working with this program is not difficult, and the result is a detailed and thorough report of all the links available on the site. In addition to its main purpose, checking broken links, Xenu can perform other tasks:

  • drawing up a site map;
  • determining page loading time;
  • search for non-unique titles;
  • identifying pages with a significant level of nesting;
  • determining the number of external and internal links on the site;
  • detecting images without an alt attribute.

The indicated points are very important for the development of the resource. Solving these problems will help optimize your WordPress blog. Therefore, I suggest you carefully study the instructions for working with Xenu Link Sleuth. Let's begin.

This application is free. You can download the Xenu program from the link: xenus-link-sleuth.en.softonic.com.

Unzip the file and run Setup.exe. After installing the program, you can begin to configure its basic parameters. It should be noted that Xenu is written for Windows and does not work with other operating systems.

The application interface is in English, but it is concise and quite simple. To create a new check, you need to click on the first icon in the upper left corner of the program window or follow the path “File” - “Check URL”. As a result, the “Xenu’s starting point” window will open with basic settings:

At the top we enter the address of the resource being inspected. If you want to include links to external resources in the check, you should leave a checkmark next to « Checkexternallinks". Button « Localfile" is for selecting a file on your computer if you want to analyze it.

In field « ConsiderURLsbeginningwiththisas 'internal':" you can add pages that relate directly to the site you are checking, but have a different address from the main page. For example, https://forum.YourWebsite.ru .

In the field « DonotcheckanyURLsbeginningwiththis:" You can list those links that you want to exclude from scanning by Xenu.

There is a button at the bottom « e-mail". You will need it if you want to receive a report on your blog analysis to your e-mail using SMTP-Server:

« e-mailreportandquitwhendone"- select this item if you want to receive the entire report immediately upon completion of the application;

« e-mailonlyiftherearebrokenlinks"- when choosing this option, a report will be sent if broken links are found.

In addition, Xenu provides a large number of additional settings. They can be called by clicking on the button « More options".

The “Basic Options” tab opens before us. The first parameter is « ParallelThreads". It regulates the number of parallel synchronous requests. In other words, how many links will be checked simultaneously. It is recommended not to exceed the default value so as not to overload the server and not affect the correctness of the audit. Paragraph « MaximumDepth" sets the maximum nesting depth of pages at which the Xenu program will run. Here you can also leave the default value. If the field « Treatredirectionsaserror" check the box, redirects will be considered by the application as an error.

There is a block of checkboxes on the right « Report". It serves to configure the output of the report after scanning the site. Select those parameters whose indicators you want to see in the end:

« Brokenlinksorderedbylinks"- broken links grouped by URL;

« Broken links, ordered by page"- similar, broken links, but grouped by page;

« Brokenlocallinks"- internal broken links;

« RedirectedURLs"- addresses with 301st and 302nd redirects;

« FtpandgopherURLs"- URLs with protocols other than http;

« ValidtextURLs"- not broken (working) links;

« SiteMap", "Statistics"- add a site map and statistics to the report;

« Orphanfiles"- single files, i.e. those for which there are no links.

If we want to apply these settings to all projects, we need to check the box « Applytoalljobs".

After making the Xenu settings, click “OK”. The program starts auditing the site. It goes through the entire blog and determines the presence of links. If there is a need to pause the application, on the panel at the top there are buttons “Pause” (suspend), “Stop” (interrupt), “Continue” (continue). How long the resource analysis will take depends on the number of pages, simultaneous streams, connection speed and server load. When the work is completed, a dialog box appears informing you about this and prompting you to display a report.

If we agree, Xenu generates an htm document with the results of the analysis performed in real time.

Now let's look at how you can use the data obtained using Xenu Link Sleuth in the program itself. The results of website SEO analysis are located in several columns. « Address" contains a list of all URLs found. In order to get more detailed information about a specific link, right-click on it and select “URL properties” in the context menu that appears. A window opens displaying the following link characteristics:

  • “Page URL” - the page to which the link leads;
  • “Title or link text” - title attribute or anchor link in our blog material;
  • “1 page linking to this one” - URL of the page where the link is located.

Next comes the column « Status» , where the statuses of all links are indicated. If we want to filter out broken links, we just need to click on the column title. Broken links, highlighted in red, will be grouped by Xenu at the top of the page.

  • not found - link not found;
  • no such host – this URL does not exist;
  • no connection – the server is not responding. In this case, you should reduce the number of simultaneous threads in the settings and repeat the check.

Bookmark « Type" allows you to sort files by extension type: images, html/css files, etc.

In the tab « Size" collected information about the weight of files in KB. You can use this data to find and compress the heaviest images on your blog.

In a collumn « Title" You can sort the results by the title meta tag of the same name. This makes it possible to find duplicate pages by visually matching headings.

The application also provides information on the following parameters:

« Level"- nesting depth of the page on which the URL is located;

« OutLinks"- the number of outgoing links on a specific page;

« InLinks"- incoming links leading to a specific page.

By using the instructions for working with Xenu Link Sleuth and analyzing the results of SEO analysis, you can easily eliminate all broken links and most duplicates on your blog.

Netpeak Spider: determining the main SEO parameters of a website.

This program is an analogue of Xenu. It allows you to scan your site for errors related to on-page optimization. Moreover, the application has a Russian-language interface, which greatly simplifies working with it. And if you are already familiar with the Xenu program, setting up Netpeak Spider will not be difficult for you.

Here is a list of the parameters that can be obtained as a result of a site audit using this program:

  • « URL"— address of the scanned page;
  • "Depth"— page nesting level;
  • « LinkCanonical"– the presence of the rel =”canonical” attribute and the address to which it points;
  • "Answer"— server response (3ХХ-5ХХ);
  • « Title", "Description", "Keywords"— content of relevant meta tags;
  • « robots.txt"— page indexing is allowed or denied (allowed/disallowed);
  • « MetaRobots"— presence of the “robots” meta tag;
  • "Redirects"— number of redirects from the page;
  • "Headlines (H1)"— number of first level headings;
  • "Links from this page", "Links to this page"— the number of all links originating from this page and leading to this page, respectively;
  • "Internal links";
  • "External links";
  • « PR",« PR (no cross-links)» — internal indicator of the Page Rank of the page, internal indicator of the Page Rank of the page without taking into account end-to-end links;
  • "Double byTitle", "Double by Description", "DoubleByKeywords"— groups of pages with a corresponding repeating meta tag.

You can download the program from the link - netpeak.ua/software/netpeak-spider. The application is free, but you need to go through a simple registration. After this, we will be sent an activation key by email, which we must use when installing the program. The installation process itself is standard: run the .exe file and follow the instructions of Netpeak Spider.

After launching the application, open a window with the necessary settings: “Settings” - “Scanning”. Select the necessary parameters and save.

In the main program window, we enter the address of the resource being checked, indicate the number of parallel threads and the depth of nesting of pages. We start scanning (the icon to the right of the field for inserting the URL).

The results obtained can be filtered using the same principle as in the Xenu program. To access detailed information about the indicator we are interested in, simply call up the context menu by right-clicking. So, for example, if we want to see a list of all outgoing links on a specific page, click on the number and select “View all links from this page” in the window that appears.

To search for duplicates, there is a smaller window to the right of the main one. It offers a “Find duplicates” button and the ability to select a filtering criterion – “By title”, “By description” or “By keywords”. The audit results can be saved as an Excel file. To do this, click on the main menu in the upper area of ​​the “Export to Excel” window.

In conclusion, it should be mentioned that both Xenu Link Sleuth and Netpeak Spider have proven themselves to be excellent tools for checking broken links and have many positive reviews among webmasters. I note that although the functionality of Netpeak Spider is somewhat broader, unlike Xenu, it does not have the ability to re-open the file being scanned.