The W3C is an important association in SEO, it is The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international community where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.The association is lead by Tim Berners-Lee and CEO Jeffrey Jaffe and the W3C’s mission is to lead the Web to its full potential. As you can expect, this organization often works together to make changes that influence how websites work and do business online, and thus, also influence SEO, social media PPC etc.
In search engine optimization, it is an issue to have broken links on your website. If you have links that go to dead pages you are not taking full advantage of passing link juice from one page to another. In light of this, the W3C offers a free link checker tool.
W3C Link Checker Tool
This is a tool that an SEO professional should know. Technically issues can hinder a website. If you have many broken links, it can damage your rankings. This W3C link checker tool allows you to see that.
One other important point, is that this tool will tell you if their bot was unable to crawl links because they were forbidden by robots.txt.
Sample Ignite Visibility W3C Link Checker Report
Here you can see a sample report from Ignite Visibility.
Sample W3C Report
As you can see, this report also tells you other issues that are associated with your website, such as Schema protocol that is not supported. Finally, it validates all of the anchor text of your links to make sure they work.
Overall, the W3C Link Checker is an excellent tool for any SEO to have in their bag. Especially, when they are evaluating a site for the first time or analyzing a site after a redesign, domain transfer, etc.
