JakeWheat.com has been around for a while, and we have always wondered about our external links and of course, our back and we have had our share of fun with hackers, filling up our posts with invisible links to Viagra ads and other such fun.  The cleaning process was maddening, but we did it and then implemented security to do our best to prevent it from happening in the future.

We don’t always know if our links (in previous articles) are broken, or if new ads from various spammers exist.  This is why we were happy to stumble upon the new website DrLinkCheck.com, which is still in the beta testing phase.  Don’t let the beta test fool you into thinking that this is not ready for use, because we found the information on our site very useful, and frankly well worth the “free exam.”

Never mind the clever graphic of the Doctor with the exam glove on the website’s introductory page, with the slogan “Trust me, It won’t Hurt” and enter in your website’s URL.  For us, we entered in our domain first, but then realized we wanted to use the actual server path to our blog to get more accurate results, so we used “http://www.streetblastmedia.com/JakeWheat” just to get the full effect, and the Doctor did the rest on it’s own.

After gently probing our website, the Doctor found 328 broken links, which we investigated to find legitimate broken links inside the article content, and received a list of them so that we could inspect and fix each of the issues that we wanted!  This is an ultimate plus, and because the website does this for free (for now) it’s well worth the health inspection for your website or blog, just to keep on top of your websites reputation.

Who wants to visit one of your past articles and find that you have reviewed a fascinating product, provided a link, and when your reader clicks on it it takes them to a 404 error page?  It makes your website look old and obsolete, and frankly is one of the reasons why DrLinkCheck.com is such a wonderful tool for webmasters!

What else does DrLinkCheck.com do?  What if you accidentally linked to a malicious website?  Yes, what if one of your links pointed to a site that would harm one of your readers computers?  Google wouldn’t like that, and neither would your readers – so DrLinkCheck.com would alert you…. in fact, their website reads:

Non-working links are considered highly unprofessional. They reflect poorly on your business and deter visitors from returning to your site. Even worse are outgoing links to websites that may cause harm to visitors through phishing or malware. That’s why Dr. Link Check not only checks the validity of links, but also matches them against lists of known malicious websites. (Source)

The link check utility starts at the URL you provided, and then crawls the rest of the site (up to 1,000 links) and then stops automatically providing you with the information you need to fix any errors that surface!  Did we mention it’s free?  Thankfully, we don’t have any blacklisted (malicious) links that showed up in our exam, but we do have broken links that we have to mend.  This makes me (Jake Wheat) very happy, but my web team are not too thrilled.  They have 328 pages to investigate and edit, and we can’t thank DrLinkCheck.com enough for giving us the tool to give us that information quickly!

We highly recommend this website, and we will be using it to check out site regularly in the future!  Remember, a healthy website is a productive website – and the exam didn’t hurt at all.

The Doctor Is In The House,
Jake A. Wheat