Broken link checker
Check every link on a page and find the ones that no longer resolve.
Free and no signup. This one fetches the URL from our server; nothing about it is stored.
Up to 40 links from one page, eight at a time. Capped so this cannot be pointed at a link farm and turned into a crawler for somebody else’s site.
About this tool
Outbound links rot at a few per cent a year, and nothing tells you. A post written three years ago is now sending readers to parked domains and 404s, which costs you their trust before it costs you anything in search — and it is invisible unless something goes looking.
- Capped at 40 links, eight at a time. That is enough to be useful on a real page and small enough that this cannot be turned into a crawler for somebody else’s site.
- HEAD is tried first because it is far cheaper for the site being checked, with GET as a fallback: a surprising number of servers reject HEAD, and reporting a working page as broken is the failure that makes a link checker useless.
- A 403 usually means a bot block rather than a broken link. Check those by hand before removing them.
- Fix by pointing at the current page where one exists, an archive where it does not, and removing the link where neither is true.
Questions
- How often should I check for broken links?
- A couple of times a year for evergreen pages. Link rot runs at a few per cent annually, so an old post with many outbound links accumulates them steadily.
- Do broken links hurt SEO?
- Outbound ones, barely. Broken internal links matter more, because they waste crawl budget and strand pages. The larger cost of both is the reader who stops trusting the page.
- Why does a link that works in my browser show as broken?
- Usually a bot block — the site is refusing an automated request with a 403 while serving you normally. Those need checking by hand.