Broken Link Checker

Broken links are hyperlinks on a website that no longer lead to their intended destination. When a user or search engine crawler clicks a broken link they receive an error response — most commonly a 404 (Not Found) status code. Broken links can also return 500 (Server Error) 410 (Gone) or simply time out without responding. Links break for several reasons. The most common cause is a page being deleted or moved without setting up a redirect. URL restructuring during a site redesign typos in the href attribute and external sites going offline are also frequent culprits. Even domain name changes or expired SSL certificates can turn working links into dead ends. Broken links accumulate naturally over time. A website with hundreds of pages linking to dozens of external resources will inevitably develop broken links as the web around it changes. This is why regular link auditing is not optional — it is a necessary part of website maintenance that protects both user experience and search performance.

Broken links damage your SEO in multiple ways. First they waste crawl budget. Search engine bots have a limited number of pages they will crawl on your site during each visit. Every broken link they follow is a wasted request that could have been spent discovering and indexing valuable content. Second broken links leak link equity. When a page with strong backlinks contains broken internal links the authority that should flow to other pages on your site is lost. This directly reduces the ranking power of your internal pages. Third broken links create a poor user experience which search engines increasingly factor into rankings. Users who encounter dead links are more likely to bounce increasing your bounce rate and decreasing dwell time — both signals that Google interprets negatively. Finally a site with many broken links signals poor maintenance to search engines. Google has stated that site quality is a ranking factor and a site riddled with 404 errors looks neglected. Over time this can erode your domain's trust and authority in search results making it harder for all your pages to rank competitively.

Start with representative high-traffic pages in CheckFast; each run inspects one submitted page and probes at most 100 unique links found there. For a recursive whole-site inventory use a dedicated crawler and then use these page-level results to verify fixes. Prioritize internal broken links first since you control them. If a destination moved update the link; if it was deleted redirect the old URL to a relevant replacement or remove the link. For broken external links check whether the destination moved. Use an archive to locate an updated source; if the resource is permanently gone replace or remove it. Implement 301 redirects for your own changed URLs and keep a redirect map in the deployment process. Prevent future breakage with regular representative-page checks and a recursive crawler after major migrations or content restructures.

We fetch the page you submit and follow the anchor tags we find checking each destination with a HEAD (falling back to GET) request. We do NOT crawl recursively beyond the submitted page and we identify as a CheckFast user-agent. Your robots.txt doesn't need special rules for us — but if your target site blocks HEAD requests globally some destinations may falsely report as errors. For recursive site-wide crawls (hundreds of pages) use Screaming Frog or Sitebulb; we're optimized for single-page spot checks.

A soft 404 is a page that returns HTTP 200 OK but whose content clearly means not found — often a homepage a branded oops page or a no results view. Google penalizes them because crawl budget is wasted indexing them. Our checker reports HTTP status codes — so a soft 404 will show as OK here. To catch them audit pages with very thin content a 200 status and titles like Page not found or Error in Google Search Console's Coverage report.

404 Not Found says I don't have this right now — Google keeps trying for months before dropping the URL. 410 Gone says this is permanently gone — stop asking — Google removes it from the index much faster. Use 410 when you've deliberately deleted content you never want back (expired campaigns deprecated APIs spammy user content). Use 404 for accidental misses. If you're migrating content use a 301 redirect instead of either — it preserves link equity.

For production marketing sites: monthly. For editorial sites with frequent publishing and lots of outbound references: weekly. For an active blog with 1000+ external links: daily monitoring (continuous monitor tier) pays for itself — link rot on external pages averages 1-2% per year and your old articles accumulate dead links silently. After any major migration deploy or content restructure run a scan the same day and again 24-48 hours later to catch caching and CDN propagation issues.

A timeout means the destination server took too long to respond (we enforce a per-link timeout budget of ~5-10 seconds). This is not the same as a 404. Causes: overloaded server rate limiting (the target blocking rapid requests) geographic latency or the server selectively blocking HEAD/GET from bot traffic. Timed-out links aren't necessarily broken from a user's perspective — but they hurt SEO crawl signals the same way. Retry once; if still timing out investigate rate limiting before removing the link.