Broken Link Checker

Broken internal links do. Every one is link equity poured into a dead end and crawl budget spent on nothing. Broken external links do not carry a direct penalty, but a page full of rotted citations reads as unmaintained to both readers and quality raters.

The first 50 links on the page. That covers almost every article and most navigation-heavy pages, and it keeps the scan under the timeout instead of hanging for a minute.

No - it crawls one page at a time. Run it on your sitemap's busiest pages, or on your blog index to sweep every post link at once.

Some sites block unknown user agents or answer HEAD requests with an error. We retry with a normal GET when a server rejects HEAD, but a hard bot block still reads as dead. Open anything surprising by hand before deleting it.

A redirect still resolves - it just costs a hop. A broken link answers 4xx or 5xx and resolves to nothing. Use the redirect checker for chains and this for dead ends.

Look it up in the Wayback Machine first. If the page still exists somewhere, repoint it. If the source is gone for good, remove the link and keep the sentence.

Quarterly for a small site, monthly if you publish weekly. External link rot runs at roughly 5% a year, so an old post quietly accumulates dead citations without you touching it.

They are not broken, but they force a downgrade and an extra redirect hop on every click. Updating them to https is a one-line fix that removes a hop from the chain.