Every dead link is a signal to Google that your site is poorly maintained. Scan any page and instantly surface every broken internal and external link — before it costs you rankings.
Search engines don't just index your content — they continuously evaluate your site's health as a trust signal. A page full of dead links doesn't just frustrate visitors; it tells Google that your domain is poorly maintained. And Google notices.
Here's what's actually happening beneath the surface every time a link on your site breaks:
Unlike browser extensions that only check visible links, our scanner processes the full HTML source of your page — exactly as a search engine crawler would. Enter a URL and we handle the rest.
<a href> element in the page source — including links buried in navigation menus, sidebars, and footers that users rarely click but search crawlers always follow.Not all broken links need the same fix. The right approach depends on where the link lives, what type of error it returned, and whether you control the destination. Here's how to work through them efficiently — starting with what matters most.
These are fully within your control and should be fixed first. If the page still has value, restore it. If the content has moved, set up a permanent 301 redirect from the old URL to its most relevant replacement. Avoid the common mistake of redirecting everything to your homepage — Google treats this as a soft 404 and discards the redirect entirely. Match old URLs to the most topically relevant existing page.
A 410 is an intentional, permanent signal: this resource was deliberately removed. If your own pages are returning 410s, strip them from your XML sitemap, internal navigation, and any content still linking to them. Google de-indexes 410 pages far faster than 404s and stops re-crawling sooner — leaving live links pointing to them wastes every crawl visit on a confirmed dead end.
If your link points to URL A → URL B → URL C, update it to point directly to C. Each extra hop shaves off a fraction of the PageRank passed through it and adds real latency for crawlers on large sites. Use the Redirect Checker to trace the exact final URL, then update the source link to skip all intermediate hops. A chain of 3 or more is always worth collapsing.
You don't control third-party sites, but you do control which ones you link to. If an external resource has been deleted, look for an equivalent: an updated URL on the same domain, an archived version via Wayback Machine, or a stronger source altogether. If no suitable replacement exists, removing the link is better than leaving it broken. Consistently citing dead pages signals editorial carelessness to both users and Google.
Server errors from external sites may be transient — a brief outage, a deployment window, or rate limiting. Recheck in 24 hours before treating it as broken. But if your own pages are consistently returning 5xx responses, treat it as urgent: Googlebot stops crawling a URL after repeated server errors and can drop it from the index well before you notice. Check your hosting status, server logs, and application error logs immediately.
A one-time scan is a start. But on a growing website, links break constantly: pages get deleted, URLs change, and third-party sites go offline. Manual checks simply don't scale.
✓ Free plan available · ✓ No credit card required · ✓ Set up in 2 minutes