Free tool
Broken Link Checker
Collects every link on the page you specify and tests each one live, so you find the 404s before your visitors and Google do.
How the scan works
Phase one fetches your page like a browser and collects up to 60 links: internal first (up to 40), then external (up to 20), skipping mailto, tel and script pseudo-links. Phase two tests each URL live in small batches, following up to three redirects, retrying doubtful responses with a browser-grade request so bot-shy servers do not produce false 403s. You watch the progress bar; the whole run typically takes under a minute.
Reading the results
Everything green: the page is clean, re-check after your next content edit. Red 404/410 entries are genuinely dead targets, the highest-value fixes on the list. Red 0/ERR entries mean no response at all: dead domains or hard timeouts, often entire sites that vanished. 5xx entries are remote servers having a bad day; re-test before acting. The report separates status from guesswork so you spend time only on real fixes.
Link rot is the web’s slow leak
Studies of large link corpora consistently find that a significant share of links die within a few years; every site that publishes for long accumulates rot. The habit that keeps it harmless costs five minutes: run your top pages through a checker quarterly and after every migration. Speaking of migrations, stranded links are how they usually go wrong, which is why every project we deliver ships with a full link audit and 301 map, the industrial version of this tool.
Frequently asked questions
Do broken links hurt SEO?
Directly, only a little: Google does not apply a "broken links penalty". Indirectly, quite a lot: internal 404s waste crawl paths and strand link equity, and a page full of dead references reads as abandoned to both users and quality raters. The practical rule: fix internal broken links promptly, review external ones periodically.
Why does the checker test one page instead of my whole site?
Whole-site crawls need minutes to hours and a queue; a free instant tool doing that badly would lie to you. One page, checked live and completely, answers the common cases: auditing a key landing page, checking a post before publishing, verifying a migrated page. For full-site audits, that is part of every migration we deliver.
A link shows as broken but opens fine in my browser. Why?
Some servers answer automated requests differently: aggressive bot protection returns 403, some misconfigured servers answer HEAD requests with errors. We retry suspicious answers with a browser-like GET to minimise false alarms, but a few sites (LinkedIn is notorious) block every checker. Verify red externals by hand before deleting them.
What should I do with the broken links I find?
Internal ones: fix the target or the link, or 301 the old URL to its successor; never leave internal 404s. External ones: relink to the current location (the Wayback Machine often reveals where content moved), replace with an equivalent source, or unlink. If the dead resource was your own old site, we restore those from archives; that is literally our job.
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