Broken Link Checker — Find Dead Links on Any Page

Google Search Console: a proper 404 or 410 on a URL that should not exist does not hurt rankings. Broken internal links still waste crawl paths and send users to dead ends — fix those. Do not blanket-redirect every 404 to the homepage (that creates soft 404s).

404 means not found (the URL might return). 410 means gone for good. Google treats them similarly for indexing, but 410 is the clearer signal when you have permanently deleted a page and want it dropped faster.

No. Only 301 to a topically relevant replacement. Redirecting everything to the homepage is a soft 404 — confusing for users and search engines, and it does not pass useful equity.

No. It scans the links on one webpage (up to 60 unique http(s) hrefs). For a full-site audit use a desktop crawler. This checker is for a landing page, listing, or article.

401/403 mean blocked (login wall or bot protection), not “this URL is gone.” We label them as blocked so you do not rewrite working links. Recheck in a browser if you need to confirm.

Internal 404s are higher priority: they break your own crawl graph. External dead links hurt trust and UX; replace or remove them. Redirect hops on either type should be collapsed to the final URL.

After launches, migrations, or big content deletes — then monthly for active sites, quarterly for quieter ones. Pair this page scan with Google Search Console’s “Not found” report.

We fetch as RowSoLinkBot and only follow public https URLs. Geo walls, bot blocks, and HEAD-disabled CDNs can disagree with a logged-in browser. 403 is reported as blocked, not dead.