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Broken Link Checker
Test every link on a page and flag the dead ones.
About the Broken Link Checker
Every link on the page is requested and its final status code recorded. Redirects are followed and reported as hops so you can see a link that works but costs an extra round trip before it resolves.
Broken outbound links are not a direct ranking penalty, whatever you may have read. They matter because they waste the reader's time and because a 404 on your own internal navigation means crawlers hit a dead end where you meant them to find a page. Internal breakage is the urgent kind; a dead link to someone else's blog post is housekeeping.
Some servers return 403 or 405 to automated requests while serving browsers normally. Cloudflare and similar services do this deliberately. Before you edit a link the checker flagged, open it yourself — a 403 from a big site is usually a bot block rather than a real failure.
Common questions
Why does a link show broken when it opens fine in my browser?
Some servers, especially ones behind Cloudflare, return 403 or 405 to automated requests while serving real browsers normally. Open any flagged external link yourself before treating it as broken.
Does this check the whole site or one page?
One page per run. Paste the page you want checked; for a full-site pass, run it against your key landing and category pages, or use the Broken Link Checker alongside the XML Sitemap Generator to get a full URL list first.
Do broken outbound links hurt my rankings?
Not directly, but they waste a visitor's time and signal an unmaintained page. Broken internal links are the urgent case — they mean your own navigation leads crawlers and visitors to a dead end.