Broken Link Checker
Scan any webpage for broken links and 404 errors — protect your SEO and user experience.
What is Broken Link Checker?
Broken links are hyperlinks that point to pages that no longer exist, returning 404 (Not Found) or other error responses. They damage user experience (visitors hit dead ends), waste crawl budget (Google spends resources following links to nowhere), and potentially signal site neglect to search engines. Outbound broken links to authoritative external sources can also undermine the credibility of your content. Internal broken links are particularly damaging — they prevent link equity from flowing through your site and can create orphaned pages that crawlers cannot reach. Broken links accumulate naturally over time as external sites restructure, content gets deleted, and domains expire. Regular audits are essential for maintaining site health. This tool crawls any webpage and checks every link on it (both internal and external) for HTTP response status, instantly identifying which links are broken and need fixing.
How to Use Broken Link Checker
- 1
Enter the Page URL
Paste a URL to scan. The tool fetches the page, extracts every hyperlink in the content, and checks each one's HTTP response status.
- 2
Review Link Status Report
All links are listed with their HTTP status codes — 200 (OK), 301/302 (redirects), 404 (not found), 403 (forbidden), 500 (server error), and timed-out links.
- 3
Fix or Remove Broken Links
Broken links (4xx and 5xx responses) are highlighted. Update them to current URLs, replace with redirected destinations, or remove the link entirely if the resource no longer exists.
Use Cases
Regular Site Health Maintenance
Schedule monthly broken link audits on your most important pages (homepage, top navigation pages, highest-traffic content). External links break frequently as sites restructure — catching and fixing them before Googlebot reports them in Search Console maintains site health and content credibility.
Content Audit Before Relaunch
When relaunching or redesigning a website, run broken link checks on all key pages to identify links that reference old URL structures. These need updating to the new URL structure, otherwise your relaunch will immediately generate 404 errors that harm both user experience and SEO.
Guest Post and Outreach Quality Check
Content marketers use broken link building as an outreach strategy: find broken external links on high-authority pages, create replacement content, and pitch the site owner. This tool identifies broken links on any target page, making it easy to find link building opportunities at scale.
Features
Internal and External Link Check
Separately categorises internal links (to the same domain) and external links (to other domains), with status checks for all — internal 404s are critical, external ones need replacing.
HTTP Status Code Display
Shows the actual HTTP response code for every link, distinguishing working links (200), redirected links (3xx), client errors (4xx), server errors (5xx), and timeouts.
Redirect Resolution
For redirected links, shows both the original URL and the final destination after following all hops — so you can update links to point directly to the final URL without the redirect overhead.
Export to CSV
Export the full link report as CSV for sharing with developers or tracking in project management tools during a systematic link cleanup.
Frequently Asked Questions
Broken links harm SEO in several ways. Internal broken links prevent PageRank from flowing through your site — pages that can only be reached via broken links become effectively orphaned and may lose rankings. External broken links waste Google's crawl budget and indicate poor site maintenance. A small number of broken links on an otherwise well-maintained site is unlikely to cause significant ranking drops, but a site with hundreds of broken links signals neglect and poor quality to both users and search engines. Google's quality guidelines explicitly mention broken links as a negative quality signal.
A 404 (Not Found) response tells Google "this page doesn't currently exist but may return in the future" — Google will keep checking. A 410 (Gone) response tells Google "this page has been permanently removed and will never return" — Google removes it from the index faster and stops spending crawl budget on it. For pages you are intentionally and permanently removing (deleted products, discontinued services, removed blog posts), returning 410 is more SEO-efficient than 404. Most web servers default to 404; you need to explicitly configure 410 responses.
Both options are valid depending on the situation. If the external page still exists but the URL changed (and the new URL is accessible via a redirect), update your link to point to the current URL directly. If the external resource no longer exists and there is a suitable replacement from another source, update the link to the new resource. If there is no suitable replacement, remove the link entirely — a paragraph that no longer has the citation it was written around may also need editing. Don't keep broken links "just in case" — they provide no value and slow down your page.
For active websites publishing new content, run broken link checks on all pages at least monthly. High-authority content pages with many external links (resource pages, link round-ups, statistical reference pages) should be checked more frequently — external links break at a rate of approximately 10–20% per year. Google Search Console's Coverage report will flag internal 404s as crawl errors, but it won't tell you about external broken links pointing away from your site — manual or tool-assisted checks are necessary for those.
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