Link Checking is always good - Xenu helps
Link checking has always been the kind of thing that I know should happen and often strive to do regularly (hmm, been a while since I’ve checked my own links, now that I think of it). Having a website with broken links is like having the space shuttle with odd white clouds leaking from the sides… it’s just not right. Nothing is worse than clicking a link you’re interested in and having it lead to nowhere.
Todays client site (who shall remain nameless) had an uncountable number of broken links. In their defense, it is a VERY old site that still has a remnant or two of dancing javascripts on the back pages somewhere. He is obviously seeking to update it and get it done right, which is why he chose this shameless self-promoter 
Enter the Xenu link sleuth. This is an awesome piece of software that crawls the site and checks internal links and external links as separate entities. It can create HTML sitemaps (poorly, but it tries) AND kick out a format suitable for a Yahoo Sitemap. Now for the big question I always hear… Yahoo Sitemap? Well, catch that story in my next article 
Yes, Yahoo has had their own sitemap format long before Google rolled theirs out. The biggest problem I see with Xenu is that it does not have a delay factor between hits. This has caused problems with very large PHPNuke based sites in the past for me, so I generally try to use it on static sites where it does not stress any one file too much (the one that creates all files in PHP-Nuke is modules.php).
Broken links are annoying to your visitors and catastrophic to Search Engines. Most engines will penalize you rfor having broken links probably for the same reason as humans find them annoying… broken links are a waste of time. They lead nowhere and then you have to back up. From an engineering perspective, they are a waste of time. Instead of clicking once to get where you want to go, broken links force you to click the back button, rescan the good page, and pick a new link to visit. The scorecard says instead of one click, you must click at least 3 times and re-scan the page for a new link. Do you have any idea how much that adds up over the course of a year?
Check your links, make sure they work. Xenu is free, but there are many other excellent pieces of link-checking software out there to choose from. Now that you read this, there is no reason to walk around with broken links hanging out… hire me! I’ll fix them…