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How to Use Broken Links Finder for Better SEO and User Experience

Let's start with a very familiar and a very real-world experience. Imagine that you are walking through a beautiful and a vibrant city, maybe a city like Colombo. You are following a map, and the map is telling you to turn down a specific and an interesting-looking street. But when you get to that street, you find that it is just a dead end. There is a big, ugly wall that is blocking your way. It is a frustrating and a confusing experience, and you have completely lost your way.

A broken link on a website is the exact, digital equivalent of that dead-end street. It is a link that promises your user a new and an interesting destination, but when they click on it, it leads them to that dreaded, that ugly, and that incredibly unhelpful, "404 Not Found" page.

Now, here is the really scary part. As a website owner, you probably have dozens, and in some cases, maybe even hundreds, of these broken, digital potholes lurking on your website right now, and you don't even know that they are there. So how do you find and how do you fix all of these frustrating and damaging, digital dead ends, long before they have a chance to frustrate your users and to damage your hard-won, SEO rankings? You send out a digital road crew to be able to inspect every single link on your site. And that is exactly what a broken link finder does.

The "Digital Dead End": What Exactly is a Broken Link?

Before we get into the easy solution, let's just make sure that we are all on the same page about what a "broken link," which is also sometimes called a "dead link," actually is. In the simplest terms, a broken link is a hyperlink on a webpage that is pointing to another webpage that no longer exists or that has been moved to a new address.

When a user, or a search engine robot, clicks on one of these links, the web server on the other end will send back an error message. The most common of these is the classic, "404 Not Found" error. This is the official, HTTP status code that a server will send back when a person has requested a page that it simply cannot find. It is very important to understand that these broken links can be either internal broken links, which are the links that are pointing to another page on your own website that you might have deleted or you might have renamed, or they can be external broken links, which are the links that are pointing to a page on another, different website that has since been taken down. And both of these types of broken links are very, very bad for your website.

Why Broken Links are Silent Killers for Your Website

So, why are these digital dead ends so incredibly damaging to the health and to the success of your website? The negative consequences are actually twofold.

The first, and the most important, reason is that they create a terrible user experience. A broken link is, at its heart, a promise that you are breaking to your user. You are promising them that you will take them to a helpful and a relevant piece of information, but instead, you are leading them to a frustrating and a confusing dead end. It makes your website look unprofessional, it makes it look sloppy, and it can seriously erode the trust that a user has in your brand. A user who hits multiple, different dead ends on your site is very, very unlikely to ever come back.

The second, and the equally important, reason is that they can seriously hurt your SEO. Search engines, like Google, see a large number of broken links as a very clear and a very negative signal of a low-quality and a poorly maintained website. A website that has a lot of 404 errors will, over time, almost certainly see its rankings begin to suffer. It also wastes your precious, and your limited, "crawl budget." You do not want the Googlebot to be wasting all of its valuable time and all of its resources on following a bunch of links on your site that lead to absolutely nowhere. This means that it might not get around to crawling all of your new, your fresh, and your most important content.

The Slow Creep of "Link Rot"

So, how do all of these broken links appear on our websites in the first place? It is, in most cases, a slow and a natural process that is often referred to as "link rot."

When it comes to your internal links, these will often break when you are making changes to your own site. You might have decided to redesign your entire website, and in the process, you might have changed your entire, URL structure. Or, you might have just deleted an old and an outdated blog post, without thinking about all of the other, different pages on your own website that were still linking to that old post.

But the most common and the most unavoidable cause of all is with your external links. Imagine you have just written a fantastic and a very well-researched article. To be able to back up all of your claims, you have linked out to a dozen, different, helpful, and external resources. Now, a year or two later, it is very, very likely that at least half of those other websites have either shut down completely, or they have moved the specific articles that you were linking to. This is the slow, the silent, and the inevitable process of link rot, and it is a constant and a never-ending battle for every single website owner.

The Manual Method: An Impossible and Mind-Numbing Task

So, if you wanted to go and you wanted to find all of these broken links on your website the old-fashioned, manual way, how would you even begin to do it? Well, the truth is that for any website that has more than just a handful of pages, it is a completely and a totally impossible task.

You would first have to go and you would have to visit every single, individual page on your entire website. Then, on each of those pages, you would have to manually and very, very carefully click on every single, individual link. You would then have to wait to be able to see if that page loads correctly, or if you get a dreaded, 404 error.

Now, just imagine for a moment that you had to do that for a website that has 500 different pages and that has a total of 10,000 different links. It is not just an impractical task; it is a physically and a mentally impossible chore for any human being to be able to do.

The Digital Road Crew: The Power of a Broken Links Finder

This pressing need for a fast, for an automated, and for a completely tireless way to be able to inspect our entire, digital road network is exactly why every single, smart webmaster in the world will regularly use a Broken Links Finder.

This type of tool is a specialized and a very clever, web crawler. The workflow is an absolute dream of simplicity. You just go to the online tool. You will see one, single, and very clear input box. You just have to enter the starting URL of your website, which is usually your homepage. You then click the "Find Broken Links" button. The tool's powerful bot will then start to crawl your entire website, in exactly the same way that a search engine would. It will follow every single, internal link that it can find, from one page to the next, until it has discovered every single page on your site. For every single link that it finds, and that includes both your internal and your external links, it will check its final, destination status. A few minutes later, it will give you a simple, a clean, and a very actionable report of only the links that it has found that are broken. And the fantastic thing is, with the kind of powerful and completely free tools you can find on toolseel.com, you can get a complete, "pothole report" for your entire website, with just one, single click.

What to Look For in a Great Broken Link Checking Tool

As you begin to explore these wonderfully simple and useful tools, you'll find that the best and most useful ones are designed to be fast, accurate, and incredibly easy to understand. They are built to give you an actionable, to-do list for improving your website's health. A really top-notch online tool for finding your broken links should have a few key features. It should include:

• A powerful and a "polite" crawler that is able to successfully navigate the entire structure of your website to be able to find all of your pages and all of your links.
   
• A fast and, most importantly, an accurate checking process that correctly and consistently identifies all of the links that are returning a 404, or any other, error.
   
• A clear, a simple, and an incredibly actionable, final report that tells you two, absolutely crucial pieces of information for each of the broken links that it finds: the URL of the broken link itself, and, just as importantly, the URL of the page on your own site where that broken link is currently located.
   
• The ability for the tool to be able to handle and to check both your internal and your external, broken links.
   
• A simple and an intuitive interface that is very easy for a non-technical website owner to be able to use and to understand.
   

A tool with these features is an invaluable asset for any serious and for any modern website owner.

The Human Webmaster: From a Report to a To-Do List

Now for the golden rule, the part of the process that turns a simple, diagnostic report into a real and a tangible improvement in your website's performance. The online tool has done its job. It has given you your list of all the broken links on your website. This is your new, and your very high-priority, SEO to-do list. Your job now is to go through that list, one by one, and to fix them.

For all of your broken, internal links, you usually have two, simple options. You can either just completely remove the dead link from your page, or, and this is the much, much better option, you can set up a proper, 301 redirect from the old, broken URL to a new, a relevant, and a working page on your site.

For all of your broken, external links, you again have two, simple options. You can just remove the link from your page. Or, you can try to be a good and a helpful citizen of the web. You can try to find a new, a working, and an up-to-date resource on that same, original topic, and you can then update your link to be able to point to that new, and that helpful, page. This process of regularly finding and of fixing all of your broken links is a fundamental and an essential part of good, technical, SEO hygiene.

Pave the Way for a Smoother Journey

Let’s be honest, broken links are the digital potholes of the internet. They create a terrible and a very frustrating experience for your users, and they send a whole host of very negative signals to the search engines. A broken links finder is the essential and the indispensable, digital "road crew" that allows you to be able to find and to fix all of these problems, easily and efficiently.

So, your website's valuable visitors deserve a smooth and a completely frustration-free journey. Don't ever let your beautiful and your helpful site become a confusing and a frustrating maze of digital dead ends. By taking just a few, short minutes to be able to regularly scan your entire website for broken links, you can patch up all of the potholes, you can dramatically improve your user experience, and you can show Google that your site is a well-maintained and a high-quality resource. It is the smart and the simple way to be able to keep all of your digital roads clear.