Link Gopher for Chrome Review — Features, Pros & ConsLink Gopher is a browser extension for Google Chrome designed to quickly find, extract, and export links from the web pages you visit. It’s aimed at researchers, SEO professionals, developers, and anyone who regularly needs to gather lists of URLs from websites. This review examines what Link Gopher does, how it works, its key features, strengths, and weaknesses, and whether it’s the right tool for your workflow.
What Link Gopher Does
Link Gopher scans the current webpage and extracts hyperlinks (anchor tags), optionally filtering by criteria such as link type, URL pattern, or whether the link is visible on the page. It can present results in a popup or a separate tab, allow you to copy selected links to the clipboard, and export results to files (CSV, TXT) for use in spreadsheets, scripts, or other tools.
Installation and Setup
- Install from the Chrome Web Store like any other Chrome extension.
- After installation, an icon appears in the Chrome toolbar. Clicking the icon opens the Link Gopher interface for the active tab.
- Permissions: the extension requests permission to read the page content for the sites where you use it (necessary to detect links). Review permissions before installing.
Key Features
- Extract all links from a page (including those hidden in the DOM).
- Filter by:
- Link text
- URL pattern (contains, starts with, ends with, regex)
- Link type (internal, external, subdomain)
- File extension (e.g., .pdf, .jpg)
- Options to include or exclude nofollow links and JavaScript-driven links.
- Preview link text alongside URLs for context.
- Copy selected links to clipboard or export to CSV/TXT.
- Sorting and deduplication options to clean lists.
- Lightweight popup UI and a larger results view in a new tab for complex pages.
- Keyboard shortcuts for quick activation.
Pros
- Fast extraction: Quickly gathers links even on large pages.
- Flexible filtering: Regex and pattern matching let you target specific link sets.
- Export options: Easy CSV/TXT export for downstream processing.
- Deduplication: Removes duplicate URLs automatically if enabled.
- Visible and hidden links: Finds links in the DOM that may not be visible on-screen.
Cons
- Permission scope: Requires page access which some users may be uncomfortable granting.
- JavaScript links: May not execute all on-page JavaScript to reveal dynamically generated links; results can vary depending on how content is loaded.
- UI limitations: Popup can feel cramped with very large result sets (though the separate-tab view helps).
- Reliability on complex sites: Single-page apps and sites that lazy-load content might need manual scrolling or alternative crawling to reveal all links.
Performance and Reliability
In testing across static pages, blogs, and documentation sites, Link Gopher performed reliably and rapidly extracted thousands of links without noticeable slowdowns. On dynamic pages (React/Vue single-page apps, infinite scroll feeds), you may need to trigger loading of content first (scroll, click “load more”) so Link Gopher can detect links present in the DOM. Some links generated purely via event handlers or created after deferred scripts may not appear.
Use Cases
- SEO audits — collect internal and external links for analysis.
- Research — compile reference links from articles, publications, and resource lists.
- Content migration — gather media or document links for transfer.
- Development/debugging — inspect link targets and attributes for QA.
- Bulk download prep — collect direct file links (PDFs, images) for batch processing.
Tips for Best Results
- For SPA or lazy-loaded pages, scroll or use the site’s UI to load all content before running Link Gopher.
- Use regex filters to focus on specific file types or URL paths.
- Enable deduplication to avoid repeated URLs when scraping paginated lists.
- Combine export with a spreadsheet or script for automated workflows.
Alternatives
There are other link-extraction tools and extensions (some browser-agnostic crawlers, bookmarklets, and more feature-rich site-crawlers). If you need deep crawling across multiple pages or automated scheduled crawls, a standalone crawler or SEO tool might be better suited.
Conclusion
Link Gopher for Chrome is a focused, efficient extension for extracting links from individual web pages. It shines when you need quick, flexible link lists with filtering and export options. It’s not a full-site crawler and can struggle with dynamically loaded content unless you first reveal that content. For on-the-fly link extraction during research or SEO checks, it’s a useful, lightweight tool — just be mindful of permissions and dynamic-site limitations.
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