6 Tools to Find Broken Links on Your Website

Websites with broken links may create a negative impression on first-time visitors, potentially harming the marketing team’s overall SEO efforts and user experience.

It can be extremely annoying for users interested in your services to access your site, then click on a link, and reach a 404 or blank page that doesn’t exist.

If you run an e-commerce site that tends to regular customers, attempting to reach a related page on your site and getting an error message can be even more disheartening. The last thing you want is to receive an email from a client that your website has a broken link and ruined their experience.

Broken links within your content can also inhibit the flow of link equity through all of your site’s pages, which can negatively impact your rankings and user engagement.

Finding Issues Within Your Website

Digital marketing agencies that manage your website should have the tools to audit and implement any identifiers to ensure they can identify any broken links within your website and create new internal link building opportunities that can help improve your website performance.

However, if your domain has extensive archived content that steadily accumulates over months and years, broken links can be quite common if not monitored and fixed throughout your digital marketing campaign.

Although some strategists are still using Xenu, the old standby among available link checkers, there are currently more choices in reviewing broken link reports.

Many digital platforms use their own auditing tools to identify broken link opportunities. Many of these tools are already part of an agency or can be individually purchased. An agency or freelancer can create a process and automate it for your convenience to avoid the need to run it manually.

Recommended Link Checking Tools for Identifying Broken Links

Below we are going to share some of the most recommended and helpful tools to help identify any broken links within your website.

Broken Link Checker WordPress Plugin

This is the most frequently used automatic link checking tool that you can easily add to your site as a plugin.

All data relative to a broken link that is detected on your web pages will appear on your dashboard, including the reason for the break.

This link checker is still one of my favorites. It offers a thorough review and is easy to implement for small and busy business owners who can’t spend time auditing their sites and are not ready to bring in an SEO consultant. While it may be the best strategy, it will also help with minor site auditing issues. It will check your entire site, including blog posts. You can run this manually or have it automated and run for you each month.

This handy tool also checks any embedded videos. If you are looking to add one right to your WordPress website, check out this plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-checker/

Screaming Frog

This simple yet powerful site crawler can collect data about your website and not only identify broken links but also tell you which pages need to be updated from those broken links.

The free version can gather data for up to 500 URLs, while the paid version offers the capacity to crawl unlimited pages.

For locating broken links, just enter the URL from your own site and run the crawler. It will promptly and efficiently provide you with an accurate listing of any identified broken URLs.

The list will reveal the identities of broken links between internal pages on your site and from external pages that are pointing to your site.

Once you know which links need to be replaced you can click the “Inlinks” tab at the bottom of the interface to access a listing of pages that are linked to the page content with the broken link.

This step will save you time as you know exactly which URL to go to in order to fix the issue.

Screaming Frog offers the options of exporting your link checking results for further viewing in the form of a spreadsheet.

This tool is also easy to obtain as a download for generating reports on your desktop, and a complete tutorial is also available on all aspects of its use from their analyser.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console includes a broken link report option for monitoring websites for content with broken links.

This broken link checker identifies any internal 404 errors or web pages linked to your web pages using incorrect URLs and pages with external links returning 404 pages.

However, this tool will not reveal any links that your site may have to external web pages that are currently 404 error pages.

When using this broken link detector provided by Search Console, you can see broken links displayed by going to “Coverage” and you will be able to see Errors appear on the right side.

Source: https://search.google.com/search-console/about

Xenu

Xenu Link Sleuth is a great and free web crawling tool. It helps you track backlinks, find broken links, and boost your SEO performance. Enter your domain name after downloading and installing the tool to begin scanning. Before clicking “OK”, uncheck the “check external links” box to improve scan performance.

The report may take a few minutes or more to generate, depending on the size of your website. Wait for Xenu Link Sleuth to finish its report and you can take the next steps in reviewing the broken links.

W3C Link Checker

This broken link monitoring tool can be used for checking specific sections of your website. It is also helpful for controlling how deep into the site the checker extends.

This option is helpful for very large-scale websites that generally experience numerous external 404 problems if site operators need to work on a single section of the site at a time.

Anyone who has performed a large number of website validations is most likely familiar with the use of this tool.

Source: https://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/draft/tr-checks/checklinks-13-owl2-dr-linear.html

SEMRush

SEMRush will enable you to crawl your website quickly and thoroughly. It will also help you understand your site and the functions and results of your digital marketing campaigns and techniques.

SEMRush provides advanced tools for enhanced strategies, content marketing, PPC ads, social media and more.

The free trial allows you to produce a single project and perform a site audit to see this tool’s full capability.

Note that the free trial will only limit your use of SEMRush. You must take advantage of the 7-day trial before considering whether this is going to be your tool for the future.

The SEMrush audit report allows you to view a list of all broken link issues and errors detected. Whether you are looking to address 4XX errors or external broken links their audit tool provides you with the list of broken links you need.

This report reveals the URL of the page where a broken link is found and the URL of the broken page.

Using this tool, you can identify both internal and external broken links for your website.

Ahrefs

This tool is designed for SEO and marketing analysis. Site owners and link builders commonly use it to monitor their competition and locate broken links.

After performing an audit with Ahrefs, you can review reports to identify any broken links on your site. All pages containing broken links will be listed in these reports.

You can also check for broken external links using Ahrefs. With the information revealed in these reports, you can initiate repairs for these links, eliminating the presence of what some web SEO strategists call “link rot” from your site.

With the information revealed in these reports, you can initiate repairs for these links, eliminating the presence of what some web search optimization experts call “link rot” from your site.

Another broken link checker that integrates well with Ahrefs and other tools is Linkminer. This tool enables you to monitor broken links on any web page instantaneously.

You can then download these links to a spreadsheet and paste them into Ahrefs’ Batch Analysis tool to gain more insight.

Screaming Frog as mentioned earlier can also integrate with Ahrefs to aid in bulk data import, and it can also be connected to Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

Outreach Methods for Redirected Links and Optimal Quality

Using the top outreach solutions and advanced tools mentioned above, you can successfully 301 redirect broken links and optimize your website for significant SEO improvements.

Recommended tools for addressing these goals include the following:

Generating Broken Link Spreadsheet Reports

Once you have identified the broken links on your website, you can download the data collected from Google Analytics or the link checker tool you choose to use.

By selecting “Export—CSV for Excel” or a similar tab on your toolbar, you can download data for broken links, page views, and unique page views and add these column headings to your spreadsheet.

When using some tools, you may need to export data as a text file, which you can then open as or convert to an Excel or other spreadsheet type.

Analyzing Data for Redirecting Pages

With the use of a tool like Google Analytics, you can examine pages that generate traffic and are no longer in existence. When you encounter broken links with multiple site sessions, it needs immediate attention and redirecting to avoid additional loss of traffic and users engagement on your website.

Some bad links can be caused by human error when someone inputs an incorrect URL for a link in the website content. A new site update that launches with a new set of URL structures can impact the overall traffic performance of the website and decline the site as a whole.

The errors in some broken links are easy to spot and correct, and you can be avoided for occurrence in future link building. Reinstating links that no longer exist can be redirected to the blog or homepage of the website.

If you are dealing with external redirects you want to replace those links with any updated versions from your source or identify a new source that can be useful for your audience.

 

Redirection Plugin

By using a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress, you can redirect the broken links through the website’s backend.

We recommend using the Redirection Plugin as it is one of WordPress’s most popular redirection options and is easy to use.

You can easily manage your 301 redirects and monitor any new and incoming 404 errors from within your website. This plugin has been available in WordPress for over ten years, and is free to use!

You can upload and permanently remove redirects after a certain amount of time on your website. You can see how many users are clicking on the redirect to the new URL and the last time it was clicked on by a user.

By knowing how often a link is being clicked on will allow you to investigate and update the URLs within your website with the correct one or request for external websites to update the URL if you have built a relationship with them.

RankMath and Yoast Plugins

Rankmath and Yoast are very popular SEO plugins that have integrated redirection options within their individual plugins. Within RankMath the Redirection plugin mentioned above is included with the free version.

Yoast Redirect manager allows you to also make changes for any broken links on your website. With Yoast you do have to have the premium version in order to go ahead and use this version of their redirect plugin.

Tip: If you use the Yoast free version and the Redirection Plugin you you don’t have to jump into a premium version right away.

Provide A Great User Experience

When it comes to addressing your broken links on your website it comes down to your user experience. If you are not providing a great user experience it makes it difficult for users to come back and engage on your website.

Broken links on your website will cause users to lose confidence and trust in your website. This can lead to an impact in overall traffic to your website.

Google is a big proponent of user experience and if you have broken links found throughout your entire website they will lower you in the SERPs.

Leaving broken links unattended will catch up to your website and should to be avoided. Having five broken links can lead to over a hundred in a short amount of time.

Hopefully, this post will help you utilize the many available tools that provide a solution for addressing broken links within your website and how to fix them.