RoborankBroken Link Checker
Enter a page and we follow every link on it, then tell you which ones are dead, which redirect, and what each server actually returned.
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Broken links
Every link we checked
Free, no signup. We check up to 50 links per page so one scan stays fast and polite to the sites being checked.
Checking one page at a time does not scale.
Roborank crawls your whole site, finds the broken links, the orphan pages and the internal linking gaps, and fixes them in your CMS.
See how Roborank worksWhy broken links matter more than the ranking argument
The usual pitch is that broken links hurt your rankings. That is overstated. A few dead outbound links will not drop a page down the results on their own, and Google has said as much.
The reason to fix them is more direct. A visitor who clicks a link and hits a 404 leaves, and on a page whose job is to send people to your pricing or your signup, that is lost revenue in the plainest sense. Internal links that break also waste crawl budget and cut pages off from the rest of the site, so a page that used to be two clicks from the homepage becomes unreachable. That does affect rankings, through indexing rather than through any penalty.
And broken outbound links accumulate quietly. An article written three years ago pointing at six sources will typically have lost one or two of them, without anything telling you.
What the status codes mean
- 404 Not found. The page is gone. Fix the URL or point the link at something live.
- 410 Gone. Stronger than a 404: the site is saying this was removed on purpose.
- 403 Forbidden. Very often a bot block rather than a dead page. Open it in a browser before you change anything.
- 401 Needs a login. Fine if that is intentional, a dead end for everyone else.
- 429 Rate limited. The link is almost certainly fine and the server just refused our check.
- 5xx Server error at the other end. Worth re-checking in a day before you act on it.
- Timed out No answer in time. Could be a slow server rather than a dead one.
Fixing them in the right order
Internal 404s first
These are entirely yours to fix and they affect how the site gets crawled. Either correct the link or add a redirect from the old URL to the right page.
Then external links in your best pages
Start with the pages that get traffic. A dead source link in an article nobody reads is not urgent.
Check the archive before deleting
If a source went away, the Wayback Machine usually has it. Linking to an archived copy is better than dropping the citation.
Do not bulk remove on a 403
A lot of sites block automated checkers. Verify by hand before you strip links that are actually fine for real visitors.
How this checker works
We fetch the page you give us the way a browser would, pull every link out of the HTML, then request each one, up to fifty per scan. We try a HEAD request first because it is cheap, and fall back to a GET when a server answers HEAD with a 405 or a 403, which many do even though the page itself is fine.
Links in JavaScript that only appear after the page runs will not be seen, because we read the HTML rather than rendering it. Mailto, tel and anchor links are skipped, since there is nothing to check.
Frequently asked questions
Do broken links hurt SEO?
A handful of dead outbound links will not drop your rankings by themselves. Broken internal links do matter, because they waste crawl budget and can cut pages off from the rest of the site. The bigger cost in both cases is visitors who hit a dead end and leave.
How many links does this check?
Up to 50 per page. That keeps a scan fast and keeps us from hammering the sites being checked. For a whole-site crawl you want a tool that runs continuously rather than a one-off check.
Why does a link show 403 when it works in my browser?
Many sites block automated requests while serving real browsers normally. A 403 from a checker usually means bot protection, not a dead page. Open it yourself before removing the link.
Does it find links added by JavaScript?
No. We read the page HTML rather than running the scripts, so links that only appear after JavaScript executes are not checked. Links in the source, including those inside noscript, are.
Should I fix broken links or just delete them?
Try to replace them first. If the page moved, update the URL. If the source is gone, an archived copy on the Wayback Machine usually exists and keeps the citation intact. Delete only when there is nothing to point at.
What should I do about broken internal links?
Fix the link itself where you can, and add a 301 redirect from the old URL if anything else might still point at it. Those are the ones worth doing first, because they are entirely within your control.
Is this broken link checker free?
Yes, with no signup. There is a daily limit per visitor so the tool stays available to everyone.