A curse of the web is the failure of links due to missing pages. Encounters with the error message "404 File not found" are common (and annoying!)

If you maintain a large web site or just a home page with a list of your favorite sites, you need to check your links periodically to insure that they remain valid.

LinkWatch can test the links in your own web pages. It can make a copy of your web pages and tag or remove those links that are bad, i.e. unreachable due to the 404 or some other error.

Many web site builders, e.g. Macromedia's Dreamweaver, now provide external link checking.

However, LinkWatch provides a number of link checking features not typically found in these other tools.

For example, every link failure is not necessarily due to a missing page. The site or a connection could simply be down temporarily for repair.

So rather than remove the link, LinkWatch allows you to tag a web page link as suspect and only remove it after repeated failure over a period of time.

It can also tag a selected link with the date of the most recent modification to the linked page.

LinkWatch checks links both to external sites and also to local pages, i.e. the relative links among your home pages.

Anchor references are also checked. (These are the links to places within a hypertext page.)