Scan any web page for broken links, 404 errors, and redirect chains. Find dead links that hurt your SEO and user experience.
OneStepToRank members get automated broken link detection across their entire site with real-time alerts, scheduled crawls, and priority-based fix recommendations.
Unlock Link Monitoring →Continuously scan your entire website for broken links, detect new 404 errors as they appear, and get priority-based fix recommendations. Never lose link equity again.
Get StartedBroken links are one of the most common and most damaging technical SEO issues. When a user clicks a link that leads to a 404 error, the experience is frustrating enough to make them leave your site entirely. But the SEO damage goes deeper than user experience. Broken internal links waste crawl budget, prevent link equity from flowing to important pages, and signal to search engines that your site is poorly maintained.
External broken links -- links pointing to other websites that no longer exist -- also hurt your site's perceived quality. Google's quality raters evaluate outbound link quality as part of their assessment framework. A page full of links to dead websites looks abandoned and untrustworthy, even if your own content is excellent. Regularly auditing and fixing both internal and external broken links is a fundamental part of technical SEO maintenance.
Broken links typically occur when pages are deleted or moved without setting up proper redirects, when URLs are restructured during a site redesign, when external websites go offline or change their URL structure, or when links are typed incorrectly in content. CMS migrations, domain changes, and permalink structure updates are particularly risky moments for creating broken links at scale. The best defense is to check for broken links before and after any major site change, and to run regular automated scans on an ongoing basis.
Use this tool alongside our Redirect Checker to trace the full path of problematic links, and our SEO Score Checker to see how broken links affect your overall site health score.
Broken links waste crawl budget, prevent link equity from reaching destination pages, and create poor user experiences that increase bounce rates. Google sees many broken links as a signal of poor site maintenance, which can indirectly affect rankings across your entire domain.
Active websites should check weekly. Large sites need at least a monthly full crawl. External links break more frequently since you cannot control other sites. Always run a full check after URL restructuring, content migrations, or site redesigns.
A 404 correctly returns a 404 status code. A soft 404 returns a 200 OK status but displays a "page not found" message. Soft 404s are worse for SEO because search engines may waste crawl budget indexing these empty pages. Google Search Console reports both types separately.
Four approaches: 1) Update the link to the correct URL if content moved. 2) Set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the most relevant page. 3) Remove the link if no replacement exists. 4) For external links, find an alternative source or link to an archived version. Fix high-traffic pages first.