Check for Broken Links on Website

A broken link is a hyperlink that points to a page that no longer exists, has moved without a redirect, or is inaccessible. Every time a visitor or a search engine crawler lands on one, they hit a dead end. That is a wasted opportunity. For users, it is frustrating – they came for something and got nothing. For crawlers, it is a signal that the site is not maintained, and it can cause them to stop following links from that page.

I use three methods to check. First, Screaming Frog SEO Spider – I run a crawl and filter by "Client Error (4XX)" in the Response Codes tab. That lists every broken internal and external link. Second, Google Search Console – under Indexing > Pages, the "Not found (404)" row shows which pages are returning 404s. That tells me which URLs on my site are dead, not just which links are broken. Third, Semrush Site Audit – it has an Issues tab where I search for "broken" and get a list of broken internal and external links.

In a recent audit, I found 47 broken internal links on a site with 500 pages. The worst part: three of them were in the main navigation. That meant every page could not reach three important pages through the nav. I fixed those by updating the URLs to the correct destinations. The rest were older blog posts that had been deleted. For those, I set up [301 redirects](/301-redirect/) to relevant category pages.

This is not just about fixing errors. It is about preserving the link equity that those links were supposed to pass. When you break a link, you lose the value that link had for SEO. A [technical SEO](/technical-seo/) audit should always include a broken link check.

Not all broken links are created equal. An internal broken link from your homepage footer is catastrophic compared to a broken link in a three-year-old blog comment. I prioritise based on two factors: where the link lives and who controls the target.

Internal broken links matter most because you control both ends. If a page in your [website structure](/website-structure/) links to a deleted page, you are telling crawlers that the deleted page still matters. You are wasting crawl budget on a page that will never return content. More importantly, you are passing link equity into a void. I have seen sites lose rankings simply because a key internal link broke when a page was moved without a [canonical tag](/canonical-tag/) or redirect.

External broken links matter less for SEO but more for user trust. If your outbound links lead to dead pages, users may think your content is outdated. I once had a client who linked to a resource that had been taken down for six months. Every time a user clicked, they saw a 404. That eroded trust in the entire site.

The timing of checks matters too. If you are about to migrate a site, check all your links before and after. After a redesign, broken links multiply because URLs change. I run a full broken link check every month and a quick check every week using Search Console's crawl errors report.

Edge case: broken links in XML sitemaps. Google will still try to crawl those. If your [sitemap](/sitemap/) includes a 404, you are wasting crawl budget and getting error signals. Always validate sitemap URLs.

I used to think broken links were a minor issue, something to fix when I had spare time. I was wrong. In my early days, I ignored external broken links entirely, assuming they did not affect SEO. Then I read a case study where a site lost traffic because external links from high-authority pages pointed to 404s on that site. The loss was not direct, but the user experience signals worsened.

I also used to believe that a 301 redirect fixed everything. It does not. If you redirect a broken link to an irrelevant page, you confuse users and dilute the relevance signal. I once redirected a blog post about "how to clean leather shoes" to the homepage. The bounce rate from that link skyrocketed. Now I always redirect to the most relevant existing page, or I remove the link entirely.

Another mistake: I assumed broken links were always caused by deleted pages. But sometimes, a page exists but the URL structure changes, or the page is there but returns a soft 404. I learned to check the actual response code, not just whether the page renders. Using Screaming Frog with a custom extraction for soft 404s helped.

Finally, I did not check external links often. They accumulate over time. A link to a resource that worked last year may now be dead. I now run a [SEO audit](/seo-audit/) every quarter that includes a full external link check.