If you are an active internet user then it is imperative that you may collect tens of hundreds (or may be thousands) of bookmarks over a period of time. If you don’t use any online bookmark services like Delicious and rely on your web browser’s bookmarking capabilities then you are on your own to manage those long list of bookmarks.

Over a period of time the links that bookmarks point to might not work any more. The website must have got shutdown, must have got moved to a different domain etc. might cause your bookmarks to not get to the website any more. Imagine if you have tens of hundreds of non-working bookmarks like that.

Help is there to clean up those non-working bookmarks. AM-DeadLink is an utility that you can download and use to clean up those non-working bookmarks on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. If you use any other browsers then you can save your bookmarks in a .URL file, comma separated file or as a tab delimited file and can use AM-DeadLink to find the links that are dead.

Follow these steps to download and install AM-DeadLink utility to cleanup those non-working bookmarks,

Step-1:

Download and install AM-DeadLink utility.

During the installation process you might be prompted to choose to install as a normal Windows application or as a portable application. Choose the one that best suits you. I’ve chosen here to install as a normal Windows application since I was installing it on my desktop. If you are installing AM-DeadLink as a portable application make sure to choose the USB drive on the location box.

Step-2:

Launch AM-DeadLink.

By default AM-DeadLink will display the list of bookmarks from your Internet Explorer bookmarks.

Along with the name of the bookmark AM-DeadLink displays the URL, Absolute Path and the Folder names of the bookmarks. The Error and Status column might be empty to begin with. Those will come into play later.

Step-3:

Once you are ready to analyze your bookmarks you have to click on the green color button with a tick mark as shown above. That will trigger the process of analyzing your bookmarks.

And once done AM-DeadLink will display statuses for every bookmarks. If it can reach to the websites then it displays “OK” on the status column. If the website is getting redirected to another website then it displays “redirected, OK”. If it couldn’t locate a website then it displays “404” in the Error column and a “file not found” in the Status column. If there is a timeout encountered when trying to reach to the website then it displays a “timeout” message on the Status column.

Now you can choose the bookmark that’s not working anymore (with a 404-file not found status) by right clicking on the bookmark and choosing “Delete” from the context menu.

It is that easy to check for non-working bookmarks and clean them up with a simple right click.

Let’s walk thru a sample scenario to cleanup Firefox bookmarks

These steps work fine for Internet Explorer. What if you wanted to cleanup your Firefox or Opera bookmarks? You have to do some extra steps to get the bookmarks to AM-DeadLink and once cleaned should get the bookmarks to the browser.

Let’s see how we can cleanup Firefox bookmarks,

Step-1:

Before we try to import Firefox bookmarks into AM-DeadLink we need to save our Firefox bookmarks as a HTML file. Launch Firefox and click on the “Bookmarks” menu and then choose “Organize Bookmarks…”.

Step-2:

Once on the “Library” window click on the “Import and Backup” menu option and then choose “Export HTML…”.

Step-3:

Firefox will ask you to save the HTML file. Choose a location that’s convenient for you and hit the “Save” button.

Step-4:

Launch AM-DeadLink and choose “Firefox” on the dropdown list at the top left.

Step-5:

AM-DeadLink will ask you to choose the HTML file that contains your Firefox bookmarks. Choose the file from the location that you’ve last saved on Step-3 and hit the “Open” button.

Step-6:

AM-DeadLink will list all your Firefox bookmarks along with the URL and other details. Now click on the green button with a tick mark to start the analysis.

Step-7:

AM-DeadLink will analyze and displays the Error and Status for each bookmark. If you’d prefer to see the bookmark in action choose the bookmark and hit the “Internal Preview” button (last but next to the Recycle Bin button). AM-DeadLink will open up the website in its internal browser so you can see where the link is getting redirected to.

Step-8:

Now, if you are sure that you don’t want a bookmark that’s not working just right click on the bookmark and choose “Delete” from the menu.

You can also find duplicates of your bookmarks using the “Find Duplicates” button. it lists the duplicate bookmarks so you can remove them forever.

Step-9:

Once you are done with cleaning up your bookmarks now it’s time to import those cleaned-up bookmarks into Firefox. Click on the “Bookmarks” menu and then choose “Organize Bookmarks…”.

Step-10:

Once on the “Library” window click on the “Import and Backup” menu option and then choose “Import HTML…”.

Step-11:

Firefox will prompt you with an “Import Wizard” asking you where to import from. Choose “From an HTML file” and hit the “Next” button.

Step-12:

Choose the HTML file where you’ve saved the Firefox bookmarks and hit the “Open” button.

Now, you’ll have your Firefox bookmarks cleaned-up. Follow similar steps for other browsers like Opera etc. For Opera, Safari and other browsers you can save the bookmarks as a comma separated file or a tab delimited file and can import the file into AM-DeadLink.

I apologize for the lengthy post and I hope you can make use of AM-DeadLink tool to cleanup all your browser bookmarks and make your web life a bit easier. If you are using any other tools to do the same please let us know in comments. If you have any questions regarding this please make sure to ask us in comments.

Download AM-DeadLink utility and clean up those non-working bookmarks.