Find & Fix Broken Links

How It Works

Why this matters

Broken links accumulate silently. A page you linked to three years ago moves, a product is discontinued, a partner rebrands, and nothing on your side changes to tell you. Visitors who hit a dead link mostly leave rather than search for the correct page, and crawlers spend part of your crawl budget confirming the same 404 repeatedly. The fix is cheap once you can see the list; the difficulty has always been that you cannot see it without checking every link on every page. Auditing outbound links a few times a year is one of the highest-return, lowest-effort things a site owner can do.

Common mistakes

• Only checking internal links. Internal breakage is easier to notice; it is the outbound links to other people's sites that rot without warning.
• Treating every non-200 as broken. A 301 is a working link, and a 403 often means the target blocks automated checks rather than that the page is gone.
• Deleting the link instead of fixing it. If you linked to something, it was supporting a point — a replacement source keeps the point standing.
• Checking once and considering it done. Link rot is continuous; a list from last year is a snapshot of a problem that has since moved.

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Frequently Asked Questions