A brief round-up of tools for checking dead links in blogs, web sites, and comments:

Xenu – Don’t be put off by the scientology reference or the awful sketch of an alien, this is the most powerful dead link checker out there. It rattles through sites, creates a list of timeouts and dead links, cob webs and more and also lets you generate a sitemap.

Broken link checker WordPress plugin – Does what it says on the tin. Checks your posts (and pages), looking for broken links, and lets you know if any are found. It also finds dodgy links in comments and lets you delete them very quickly.

WP-Auto Blogroll Checker – Also does what its name would suggest, scours your blogroll for broken links. Now, I’ve got a big blogroll on Sciencebase and this took quite some time to run through it (time presumably also depends on your internet connection speed). It also threw up quite a few false positives. So, double check before removing any “dead” links.