Broken Links: A Slow Drain on Your Authority
Internal broken links waste crawl budget and hurt the user experience. External broken links to dead resources are usually the bigger problem — they signal to search engines that your content isn’t maintained. Both should be fixed regularly, ideally as part of a quarterly content audit.
What we check
For each unique <a href> on the page we send a HEAD request (with a GET fallback for servers that reject HEAD). We follow redirects and report the final status code. The results are split into internal vs external, ok vs broken, and you can filter the list to focus on what matters.
What to do with the results
For internal broken links, fix them — either correct the path or 301 redirect the destination. For external 404s, replace the link with a current source or remove the reference. For external 403/redirect-to-homepage cases, the source has often moved their content; track it down or update. For external timeout errors, retry once before assuming the site is down.