Technical SEO

Broken Link Checker: The 20-Minute Audit That Stops Google and Your Visitors Hitting Dead Ends

Graham HolmesAugust 5, 20269 min read

Ever clicked a link, waited that hopeful half-second, and landed on a big unfriendly "404 Not Found"? Annoying, isn't it. Now imagine your visitors doing that on your site — except they don't shrug and try again. They leave. A broken link checker is the tool that finds those dead ends before your customers (and Google) do, and this guide shows you exactly how to run one and fix what it turns up.

What Is a Broken Link, Really?

A broken link is a hyperlink that points to something that isn't there any more. You click it expecting a page and instead get an error. Simple as that.

Under the bonnet, every link your browser follows gets a status code back from the server — a little three-digit reply that says how it went. Think of it like knocking on a door:

200 — someone answers, all good.

301 / 302 — they've moved, here's the new address (a redirect).

404 — nobody home, and there's no forwarding note. This is your classic broken link.

500 — the door's on fire. Something's broken on the server itself.

A broken link checker knocks on every door for you, thousands of times, and hands you a tidy list of the ones that didn't answer properly. Doing that by hand would take you the rest of your natural life.

Why Broken Links Quietly Hurt Your SEO

Here's the bit most people miss. Broken links don't just look scruffy — they leak value in three ways.

They waste crawl budget.* Every time Google's crawler follows a link to a dead page, that's a visit it didn't spend on a page that actually matters. On a small site you'll barely notice. On a big one, it adds up.

They strand link equity.* When another site links to a page of yours that you've since deleted, all that lovely ranking power flows straight into a 404 and evaporates. It's like inheriting a house and letting it fall down instead of moving in.

They annoy the humans.* And humans who hit a dead end bounce. High bounce, short visits and a general sense that your site is held together with sticky tape — none of it screams "trustworthy" to a search engine.

None of this is dramatic on its own. It's death by a thousand paper cuts. Which is exactly why a quick, regular check pays for itself.

How to Check for Broken Links (the Free, No-Faff Way)

Bet you thought this needed a paid crawler and a spreadsheet degree. It doesn't. Our Broken Link Checker does the whole job in the browser, free, with no sign-up and no email harvesting.

Here's the drill:

Pop in your URL. Enter your homepage (or any page you want to crawl from) and hit scan.

Choose how deep to go. Slide the crawl limit anywhere from 100 up to 500 pages. Start small on your first run so you can see how it behaves, then open it up.

Let it crawl. The tool follows your internal links, page by page, checking every link it finds along the way — both internal links to your own pages and external links pointing off to other sites.

Read the results. You get every broken link, the status code it returned, and — this is the useful bit — the exact page each broken link sits on. No more guessing where the dead link is hiding.

Export if you want to. Print the report, save it as a PDF, or pull it into a CSV so you can work through the fixes and tick them off.

That's it. No installs, no credit card, no "start your 7-day trial" nonsense.

A Quick Worked Example

Say you run a 180-page shop. You crawl the lot and the checker flags 12 broken links. Here's how that might break down:

7 internal 404s — old product pages you discontinued and deleted, still linked from your blog posts.

3 external 404s — you linked to a supplier's spec sheet and a couple of articles that have since vanished.

2 server 500s — a third-party widget that's fallen over.

The report tells you each broken link and the page it lives on. So you open the three blog posts holding those seven dead product links, and you either point them at the nearest live product or strip the link out. Ten minutes, done. The external ones you swap for a working source or remove. The 500s you flag to whoever owns that widget.

Twelve paper cuts, patched up over a cup of tea.

How to Fix Broken Links Once You've Found Them

Finding them is half the battle. Here's how to actually deal with each type:

Broken internal links (links to your own pages)

You've got three sensible options:

Redirect it. If the page moved, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. That's the tidiest fix — visitors and link equity both follow the trail. Not sure your redirects are behaving? Our Redirect Checker shows you the full chain.

Update the link. If the target still exists at a different URL, just point the link at the right place.

Remove it. If the destination is genuinely gone for good and there's no replacement, delete the link rather than leaving a trap for people to fall into.

Broken external links (links to other sites)

You can't fix someone else's site, but you can stop pointing at their rubble. Either find a fresh, working source that says the same thing, or remove the link. Don't leave your readers walking into someone else's dead end.

Server errors (those 500s)

A 500 usually means something's genuinely broken server-side — a script that's timing out, a plugin that's thrown a wobbly, or a page that's too heavy to load. If it's your own page, our HTTP Header Checker and Slow Resources Finder help you see what the server's actually sending back and what's dragging the page down.

How Often Should You Run a Broken Link Check?

Depends how busy your site is. A rough rule of thumb:

Small, stable brochure site: once a quarter is plenty.

Active blog or shop: monthly. Every time you delete a page or change a URL, you risk orphaning links pointing at it.

After any big change: a site migration, a redesign, a bulk delete of old content — always run a check straight after. Migrations are where broken links breed.

Stick a recurring reminder in your calendar. Future-you will be grateful.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this broken link checker really free?

Yes — genuinely free, no sign-up and no email required. You can crawl up to 500 pages, see every broken link with its status code and the page it sits on, and export the results. No trial timer counting down in the corner.

What's the difference between a broken link and a redirect?

A redirect (a 301 or 302) still gets the visitor somewhere — it just sends them on to a new address. A broken link (usually a 404) sends them nowhere. Redirects aren't errors; they're the proper way to move a page. It only becomes a problem when a redirect points at another dead page, which is why checking the full chain is worth doing.

Will broken links get my site penalised by Google?

There's no specific "broken link penalty". But broken links waste crawl budget, strand the ranking power from any external links pointing at deleted pages, and give visitors a poor experience — all of which quietly work against you. Fixing them removes friction rather than earning a magic boost.

How many pages can I crawl at once?

Anywhere from 100 to 500 pages per scan, set with a simple slider. Start at the low end for your first run to see how your site behaves, then turn it up.

Does it check external links too, or just internal ones?

Both. The checker follows the internal links to crawl your site, and it checks every link it finds along the way — including the external ones pointing off to other websites. Broken external links are just as worth clearing out as internal ones.

Put It Into Practice

Here are the free KeywordNumbers tools that pair best with this guide:

Broken Link Checker — crawl up to 500 pages and find every broken internal and external link, with status codes and the page each one sits on.

Redirect Checker — follow the full redirect chain for any URL and spot redirects that end in a dead page.

HTTP Header Checker — see exactly what status codes and headers a page is sending back.

Slow Resources Finder — find the images, scripts and files dragging a page's load time down.

Every one of our free SEO tools is genuinely free to use, with no sign-up required.

Free tools to put this into practice

Reading is one thing — testing your own pages is what moves the needle. Here are the free KeywordNumbers tools that pair best with this guide:

Keyword Search Volume Checker — see estimated monthly searches, trends and seasonality for any keyword.

AI Keyword Ideas — generate fresh, related keyword ideas around your topic in seconds.

Keyword Density Checker — check how often your target terms appear so your content reads naturally.

Every one of our free SEO tools is genuinely free to use, with no sign-up required.

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