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Off-Page & Links

Broken Link Checker

Follows the external links on your page and reports which ones are dead.

Free, no signup. We fetch the page once and read what your server sends back.

Fetching the page…

What this checks

Links rot. Roughly a tenth of external links stop working every year as companies close, sites are rebuilt and URLs change. Broken outbound links do not carry a direct ranking penalty, but they are a strong signal of a page nobody has looked at in years, and a reader who hits one loses trust immediately.

  • One representative link per external domain, up to twelve
  • HTTP status of each
  • Redirect chains that end somewhere unexpected
  • Blocked-to-bots responses reported separately from genuine breaks

How to act on the result

  • Fix a broken citation by finding where the content moved, or replacing the source. Deleting the link and leaving the claim unsupported is the worse option.
  • If a link now redirects to a domain-squatter or an unrelated site, remove it. Expired domains get bought and repurposed constantly.
  • Check the pages that pointed at you too. Your best backlinks can end up on pages that no longer exist.

Frequently asked

Why does it only check one link per domain?

Because checking every link on a page with fifty links to the same site would mean fifty requests to that server, which is rude and slow, and would tell you nothing extra. If one URL on a domain resolves, the domain is alive. If it does not, the tool flags it and you can look closer.

A link works in my browser but shows as blocked here. Why?

Some sites, particularly large publishers and anything behind Cloudflare, block automated requests. That returns 403 or 429 to us and 200 to you. We report those as blocked rather than broken, deliberately, because calling them broken would be wrong.

Do broken links hurt SEO?

Not directly, and anyone selling you an urgent fix is overstating it. The indirect cost is real though: broken links suggest an unmaintained page, and unmaintained pages tend to lose ground to maintained ones over time. It is also simply a bad experience.

What about broken internal links?

Different problem, worse consequences, different tool. Use the Internal Link Checker for those, since a broken internal link wastes crawl budget and can strand a page with no route to it.

Want all 46 checks at once?

Run the full free report, or have us go through it with you on a call.