Broken Link Checker


What are broken links?

Broken links are website hyperlinks that do not find their chosen website target. For example, a link on bbc.co.uk that points to boref.com instead of bored.com would be a broken link as boref.com does not exist. Another example would be if a website on bbc.co.uk was pointing to google.com/missingWebPage.html. If missingWebPage.html has been removed by Google then this would result in a 404 error and another broken link.

Why should I use this broken link checker tool?

We all know links power your website up the search engine rankings and its very tempting to break the Google webmaster guidelines and buy links or spam links. However this can very risky and may get your website delisted on Google. So if you're looking for a legit whitehat risk free way of getting backlinks to your website a broken link building campaign is a great option. This tool can also be used for analysis or audit on your own website too.

How does a broken link campaign work?

Once you find a broken link on a website that you like the look of you simply email the website owner and inform them that they have an issue and that you have some relevant content to replace this link. You won't always get a nice new shiny link but over time you will get good results and whats more important is these types of links are safe, you haven't gone against the Google webmaster guidelines in anyway.

How does it work?

You have two options in broken link checker. Firstly you can enter a single website or list of websites that you want to crawl and try and find broken links on. Or secondly you can enter your keywords you're trying to rank for and the software will grab as many websites ranking for those search terms as you want and then crawl those. Detecting these links to remove on your own website can be a very time consuming process, let this software do it all for you by scanning your website and generating your report in minutes.

Show me the software in action




Change log

  • 19/06/2016 - Initial release
  • 19/06/2017 - Added bug reporter
  • 18/01/2018 - Added fix for scraping bing

Video transcript

This is the transcript from the video above, it needs tiding up a little as its from YouTube subs.

Hi guys it's Jamie from MaxResultsSEO.com in this video I'm going to show you how to use my broken link finder tool. For those of you don't know what broken link finder is, it allows you to find broken links in a websites HTML. Expired Domains etc for various niches or on a specific list of websites, and you can choose broken links as a great way of finding free white, fully safe, stong links to boost your website up the rankings.

Okay, so let's start: firstly, you have two options. You can either crawl a list of websites that you specify for broken links or you can enter search terms and broken link finder will scrape domains that are returned from Bing for those search terms. In this example we will go with the search term option, so click search website from keywords and enter a list of lines, separated keywords, so we're going to go for a funny dog picture and funny cat videos.

Now there's a couple of quick things. I just like to touch on before we start the search. This just scrape, don't auto crawl, quite handy because what you'll find sometimes is when you search for terms on Bing you'll, get a lot of them but not highly related pages, but they're on really authority domains like Amazon and obviously you don't really want to go crawling thousands of thousands of pages on Amazon to try and get a link from them because it won't happen. So you can quickly search great, just scrape option and I'll bring back all the domains then put them in the box on the left here and then you can manually remove the ones that you don't want and then start the tool.

Also a few small options here. I probably just leave those as they are. If you find you're getting loads and loads of false positives broken links, then you can tick that so you only get 404's and not none resolving domains. I leave the rest. Now enter the amount of pages you'd like to scrape from on Bing. In this example, that's just a couple of pages then enter the amount of pages you'd like to crawl for broken links on each domain. In this example, we'll just leave it at a thousand. Now, let's click start and see what we get okay. Well, it's only been running for about 30 seconds. Now you can see it's already found some 404 errors. Some expired domain names here or invalid domain names or the DNS is incorrectly configured but yeah there you go so you can export those and then sort through them to find the ones that you want, and email the webmasters and see if you can score some strong links. Okay, that's it. I hope you've enjoyed the video guys.