🕷️ Dead-Link Watchdog

Automatic, affordable link-health monitoring for any website

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🚀 Overview

Dead-Link Watchdog keeps your website clean and reliable by automatically scanning for broken, redirected, or slow links — not just 404s.
It’s fast, cloud-based, and costs only $0.0008 per link checked.
That means you can audit 1 000 links for $0.80 or a full 10 000-page site for under $8.

Built on Crawlee and powered by Apify’s built-in scheduler, it runs in the background so you never need to worry about stale URLs or failing redirects again.

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💡 Key features

• 🔍 Comprehensive checks — flag any HTTP status codes you choose:
  default = 400+, or pick specific ones like
  400 401 403 404 410 429 500 502 503 504 301 302.
• 💸 Ultra-low price — just $0.0008 per link checked (1 000 links = $0.80).
• 📅 Fully schedulable — use Apify’s built-in scheduler to run daily, weekly, or monthly scans automatically.
• 📊 Structured output — all results saved to your Apify Dataset (viewable online or exportable as CSV / JSON).
• ⚡ Zero setup — no proxies, servers, or local installs required.
• 🧩 Configurable depth & limits — control both crawl depth (maxCrawlDepth) and total pages (maxRequestsPerCrawl).

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🧰 Typical use cases

🧩 Scenario	Description
🧱 Website QA	Catch broken or redirected links before users do.
🔍 SEO health checks	Detect redirect chains, 404s, and server errors that hurt rankings.
📚 Docs maintenance	Keep documentation and changelogs clean across hundreds of internal/external links.
📢 Agency reports	Schedule weekly link-health reports for multiple client domains.

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⚙️ How it works

1. Start from your domain or sitemap.
2. The actor crawls pages up to your chosen depth (maxCrawlDepth).
3. Each <a href> link is tested via a lightweight HEAD request.
4. Any link returning a flagged status code is recorded with:
   • Source page
   • Target URL
   • HTTP status code
   • Response latency (ms)
   • Timestamp

All results appear instantly in your Apify Dataset — ready to export or integrate into dashboards.

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🧾 Input parameters

Field	Type	Default	Description
startUrls	array	[{ "url": "http://www.example.com" }]	One or more URLs or sitemaps to start crawling from.
maxCrawlDepth	integer	2	How many link-levels deep to crawl from each start URL.
flagStatusCodes	array	[]	List of HTTP status codes to flag (e.g. [404, 500]). If left empty, all 400+ codes are flagged.
includeExternal	boolean	false	Whether to check links to external domains.
timeoutMs	integer	8000	Timeout in ms for each request.
maxRequestsPerCrawl	integer	300	Maximum number of pages to crawl (0 = unlimited).

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🧩 Example usage

🔹 One-off scan

Run manually on any domain to generate an instant link-health report.

🔹 Automated monitoring

1. Open your actor’s Run page.
2. Click Schedule → New schedule.
3. Choose frequency (daily, weekly, etc.) and your input parameters.
4. Save — your site will now be scanned automatically at that interval.

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💸 Pricing

• $0.0008 per link checked
  • 100 links → $0.08
  • 1 000 links → $0.80
  • 10 000 links → $8.00
• You control cost through maxRequestsPerCrawl.
• No hidden fees, no proxy charges.

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📊 Output example

{
  "source": "https://example.com/about",
  "target": "https://example.com/missing-page",
  "status": 404,
  "latency": 120,
  "timestamp": "2025-10-25T13:10:00Z"
}