How the link checker works
Starting from the page you enter, we follow internal links breadth-first up to two levels deep and add pages listed in your XML sitemap, for up to 40 pages. On those pages we collect up to 150 unique links, internal and external, and test each one with a lightweight HEAD request, falling back to GET for servers that do not support it. We respect the Disallow rules in your robots.txt and crawl politely, a few requests at a time.
- Broken links: 4xx and 5xx responses and timeouts, with the page they appear on.
- Redirect chains that send visitors through several hops before the final page.
- Crawled pages with a missing title or meta description.
- Duplicate titles and descriptions across pages.
- Pages that receive very few internal links.
Why broken links cost you clients
Websites of professional firms accumulate links over time: to court and registry websites, legislation databases, chamber directories, partner profiles of colleagues who have left and news articles that were later moved. Each of these can break without anyone noticing. A visitor who clicks a dead link on a page about your fees or your team draws conclusions about how carefully the firm works.
For search engines, broken internal links waste crawl budget and stop link value from reaching the pages that matter, and long redirect chains slow both visitors and crawlers down.
Fixing what we find
For each broken internal link, either restore the missing page or update the link to point to the current URL; if the page was deliberately removed, add a 301 redirect to the closest replacement. For external links, find the new address of the resource or remove the link. Replace links that pass through several redirects with the final destination.
Duplicate titles and descriptions are usually template defaults; give each page its own.
Keeping links healthy
Links break most often after a redesign, a CMS migration or a change of URL structure. Before relaunching, export the list of old URLs and map each one to its new address with a 301 redirect. Afterwards, run this check once and again a few weeks later, and add a quarterly check to whoever maintains the site — external resources such as registries and legislation portals change their addresses more often than you might expect.