What is the Broken Link Checker?
Twaino’s Broken Link Checker is a free tool that scans your web page to identify all links that no longer work — the infamous broken links or 404 errors. These dead links point to pages that no longer exist, have been moved, or are temporarily inaccessible, and they represent a major problem for both user experience and SEO.
On the web, content constantly evolves: pages are deleted, domains expire, URLs are changed during redesigns. Over time, broken links inevitably accumulate on your site. Without regular checking, these dead links progressively degrade your site’s quality in Google’s eyes and frustrate your visitors.
Why are broken links harmful to SEO?
Broken links affect your search rankings in several significant ways:
Crawl budget waste: Googlebot has limited time to explore your site. Each time it encounters a broken link, it wastes crawl budget unnecessarily by attempting to access a page that doesn’t exist. This budget could have been used to discover and index your truly important pages.
Loss of link juice: An internal link to a 404 page wastes the SEO value that link could have passed on. If multiple pages on your site point to a broken URL, you lose the equivalent of the sum of these internal links in terms of page authority.
Negative quality signal: A site full of dead links sends a negative signal to Google: the site is not well maintained, the content is not up to date. This can affect Google’s overall perception of your domain’s quality.
User experience degradation: Nothing is more frustrating for a visitor than clicking a link and landing on an error page. Each broken link increases the risk that the visitor will leave your site, resulting in a higher bounce rate.
How to use the Broken Link Checker?
Our tool is simple to use and delivers actionable results quickly:
Step 1: Enter the URL of the page you want to check in the input field. You can test any publicly accessible page.
Step 2: Launch the scan by clicking the check button. The tool will crawl the page, identify all links, and test each one to verify if it’s functional.
Step 3: Review the report that clearly lists working links, broken links (404 error), redirects (301, 302), and server errors (500). Each link is accompanied by its HTTP status code and anchor text.
Step 4: Fix broken links by updating them to the correct URL, replacing them with relevant alternative resources, or removing them if they’re no longer needed.
Different types of link errors
Our tool detects several categories of issues:
- Error 404 (Not Found): The destination page no longer exists. This is the most common type of broken link
- Error 410 (Gone): The page has been intentionally removed and will not return
- Error 500 (Server Error): The destination server is experiencing a technical problem
- Error 503 (Service Unavailable): The server is temporarily out of service
- Timeout: The server doesn’t respond within the allotted time, often a sign of a slow or unavailable site
- Redirects (301/302): The link works but redirects to another URL, which may be intentional or signal a problem
How to fix broken links?
Here’s what to do depending on the situation:
For broken internal links, identify the correct URL of the destination page (it may have been renamed or moved) and update the link. If the page no longer exists, create a 301 redirect to the most relevant page or remove the link.
For broken external links, check if the resource is available at another URL (sometimes the site has been restructured). If the page has permanently disappeared, you can search for the archived version on Wayback Machine or replace the link with a similar quality resource.
Implement a regular verification process, ideally monthly, to detect new broken links before they accumulate. The faster you fix them, the less impact on your SEO.
FAQ
How many broken links are tolerable on a site?
Ideally, your site should have no broken links. In practice, a few broken links on a large site won’t cause major damage as long as you fix them quickly. However, if more than 5% of your links are broken, it becomes a significant problem that can affect your SEO ranking and credibility with visitors.
Do broken links directly affect my Google ranking?
Broken links are not a direct ranking factor in the same way content or backlinks are. However, they indirectly affect your SEO by degrading user experience (which increases bounce rate), wasting crawl budget, and sending a signal of a poorly maintained site. Google confirms that well-maintained sites are favored in search results.
What’s the difference between a 404 error and a 301 redirect?
A 404 error means the requested page doesn’t exist or no longer exists, and the visitor lands on an error page. A 301 redirect means the page has been permanently moved to a new URL: the visitor is automatically redirected to the correct page. The 301 redirect is the recommended solution when you change a page’s URL, as it preserves most of the SEO juice.
How often should I check my site’s links?
We recommend monthly checking for medium-sized sites (50-200 pages) and weekly for large sites (500+ pages) or sites with many external links. After a site migration or major redesign, an immediate and complete check is essential.
Does the tool also check links in images and downloadable files?
Yes, our tool checks all links present in the page’s HTML, including links in images (src attribute), links to PDF files or downloadable documents, and links in href attributes of anchor tags. All types of linked resources are verified.
Why does a link work in my browser but is reported as broken by the tool?
Several possible reasons: the destination site blocks automated requests (bots), the link requires authentication or session cookies, the site takes too long to respond and exceeds the tool’s timeout, or the site is geo-restricted. In these cases, manually verify the link and ignore the false positive if necessary.