How Do You Find & Fix Broken Links?

  • Check for broken external and internal links
    1. Look at your redirect plugins. They will often keep a log of 404 errors.
    2. Look at your “log files,” if you have them configured, to spot traffic to pages that no longer exist.
    3. Run a crawler of your choice and get your list of broken links.
    4. Check with a 3rd party tool like aHrefs, Semrush, SEO Clarity, etc. that has external link data, to find links to pages on your site that no longer exist.
    5. Check Google Search Console for your 404 errors. It has been discovered.
  • If the page was actually SUPPOSED to exist, recreate or restore it. If you’re recreating it, then you might as well improve on it.
  • If you cannot or do not want to restore the page, that’s when you want to add a 301 redirect.
Use GA to find 404 errors

Max Peters of Technical SEO consulting also had this to add: Check Google Analytics for any URLs that might have gotten traffic but are now 404s. You can easily do this in Screaming Frog using the Google Analytics API integration:

  • Set the date range back a year (or longer).
  • In the Segment setting, choose “all users’.
  • In the general tab, click ‘Crawl New URLs discovered in Google Analytics’.
  • You can also use Screaming Frog in a similar way to find 404s in GSC.

Learn how to solve other SEO issues

Twitter is an amazing SEO resource. These are other recaps of answers to common SEO questions or challenges I see floating around the Twitterverse, to quickly vanish. Here are some recent #seobits I’ve created to capture these ephemeral threads for future reference.

Categories: SEObits

Jeremy Rivera

Jeremy Rivera started in SEO in 2007, working at Advanced Access a hosting company for Realtors. He came up from the support department, where people kept asking "How do I rank in Google" and found in the process of answering that question an entire career. He became SEO product manager of Homes.com, went "in-house" at Raven Tools in Nashville in 2013. He then worked at several agencies like Caddis, 2 The Top Design as an SEO manager and then launched a 5 year freelance SEO career. During that time he consulted for large enterprise sites like Smile Direct Club, Dr. Axe, HCA, Logan's Roadhouse and Captain D's while also helping literally hundreds of small business owners get found in search results. He has authored blog posts at Authority Labs, Raven Tools, Wix, Search Engine Land. He has been a speaker at many SEO conferences like Craft Content and been interviewed in numerous SEO focused podcasts.