Bosanski
DeutschA broken link sends visitors and Googlebot to a page that doesn't exist. The visitor leaves, and Googlebot wastes time on addresses that return nothing. This tutorial takes you from the crawl to a list a developer can fix right away.
Steps
- Crawl the site in Whole site mode. Leave external link checking on if you also want to check links to other sites.
- Open the Response codes tab and choose the Internal: client error (4xx) filter. These are addresses on your site that return 404, 410 and similar.
- Click a URL and open Inlinks in the bottom panel. There you see every page that links to the broken address, the anchor text and where the link sits: in the content, the menu or the footer.
- Repeat for Internal: server error (5xx) and Internal: no response. These are often not broken links but a server problem, so they go to someone else.
- Check external links with the External: client error (4xx) and External: no response filters.
- Export the list for fixing: in Bulk export, choose inlinks by response code. You get a table with the three columns a developer needs: the page with the link, the broken address, the anchor text.
How to fix them
- A link in the menu or footer is on every page, so fixing it in one place clears hundreds of rows.
- The page has moved: change the link to the new address and add a 301 from the old one.
- The page was deleted on purpose: remove the link. Redirect the old address only if a genuinely similar page exists, not to the home page.
Check your fix by pasting the fixed addresses into URL list and crawling only those. It takes seconds, not a whole new crawl.