What is a broken link checker, and is it free?

A broken link checker requests every link on a site and reports the ones that fail. That is the whole idea. What separates them is scope, and scope is what the price usually reflects.

How do you work a broken link report efficiently?

Work the report by destination rather than by page. A dead link in a shared footer or navigation block appears on every page that renders it, so per-page it reads as hundreds of errors and per-destination it is one fix. Sorting by how many pages reference each dead URL puts the template-level faults at the top, and clearing those collapses the total before you touch an individual article. Then re-check after fixing. The point of the second run is not the number: it is catching fixes that did not deploy, and links that were repointed at another URL which is also broken.

Broken Link Checker - Find Broken Internal Links

Broken Link CheckerEvery link goes somewhere real.

Find broken internal and outbound links, redirect chains and broken redirects: each with the page it was found on, so you know exactly where to fix it.

Last reviewed · 1 Oct 20265 primary sources →Kalenux engineering

Internal linksOutbound linksRedirect chainsBroken redirectsSource pagesAnchor text

01Why links need to resolve

Google finds pages and understands them largely through links, and only reliably follows <a href> links to resolvable URLs [1].

A link to a 404 still gets crawled, but the request lands nowhere. The page it pointed at is dropped from the index over time [2].

02A 404 is correct; linking to one isn’t

Google has said 404s for pages that genuinely no longer exist don’t hurt the rest of the site’s rankings [3]. The problem is your own links still pointing at them.

Pages that are gone should return 404 or 410, not a 200 “not found” page, which Google treats as a soft 404 [2].

KEY FACTServing 200 on an error page creates a soft 404. Removed pages should return 404 or 410 [2].

03Links that go through redirects

Googlebot follows up to 10 redirect hops [2], and treats permanent redirects as a strong canonical signal [4].

A link via a redirect still works, but each hop is an extra request, and a chain that ends in an error loses the target entirely. That’s why the checker flags them too.

04Outbound links and rel attributes

For outbound links you don’t vouch for, Google supports rel="sponsored", rel="ugc" and rel="nofollow"[5].

The checker reports those attributes alongside status codes, so a dead sponsored link and a dead editorial link can be told apart.

References

[1]Link best practices for Google · Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/links-crawlable
[2]How HTTP status codes and network errors affect Google Search · Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/http-network-errors
[3]Do 404s hurt my site? · Google Search Central Blog, 2011developers.google.com/search/blog/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site
[4]Redirects and Google Search · Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/301-redirects
[5]Qualify your outbound links to Google · Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/qualify-outbound-links

CITE THIS PAGEKalenux. (2026). Broken link checker: find dead internal and outbound links. Kalenux SEO Guide. Last reviewed 1 Oct 2026. kalenux.com.tr/seo-broken-link-checker

Broken Link CheckerEvery link goes somewhere real.

Links break on their own.

Follow each link to where it lands.

Seven answers a link can give.

Fix the link where it lives.

What the search engines say about broken links.

01Why links need to resolve

02A 404 is correct; linking to one isn’t

03Links that go through redirects

04Outbound links and rel attributes

References

Keep checking.