How to Find and Fix Broken Links on Your Website

Grab some coffee or tea and be prepared to start cleaning your digital presence because this might pay you back very nicely in the future.

How dead links might affect your website ranking in Google

We know that Google prefers quality over quantity. We know that Google likes your website to be optimised for human beings. Imagine that you are a prospective customer looking for your products or services. You find an interesting link with an eye-catching title that gives you the answer to your query. You click on it and what happens? Nothing. You either get a 404 error or see the homepage. You’re lost. Probably 80% of most people will leave your website and never come back.

Google understands this (here you can read about the term “bounce rate”), and based on how many dead links your website has, it can affect your ranking. That’s why having broken links might and will essentially lower your position in search results on Google.

How to find broken links

Now that you understand how broken links on your website can be potentially dangerous, it’s time to find them. How? We will use the free website called Dead Link Checker.

Just go and type your website address and hit “check.” Give it some minutes for AI to harvest, fetch, and check your dead links.

After a while, you should get a result showing you all the broken links. Copy each of them and paste them somewhere.

How to fix broken links: Google Search Console method

You need to have access to Google Search Console. If you haven’t signed up for this yet, do it as soon as possible. Google Search Console (GSC) will give you all the essential information about your website performance, broken sitemaps, and other crucial data. GSC also has the ability to remove broken links. Yes, you can remove broken links directly from Google. I also did a TikTok video so feel free to watch it (and follow my account for more tips!).

Once you log in, look on the left side for the “Removals” tab.

Click on it and click on “New Request.”

Copy a single dead link (make sure to select the whole address) previously copied from the tool and paste it inside the input. Hit the “Next” button.

Hit “Submit Request.”

Repeat the whole process for all of your dead links.

Done. Give some time for Google to investigate all of the changes. Once it done you should see something like this:

That’s it. Congratulations—you just accomplished one of the boring, yet critical, tasks that many webmasters do. Fixing broken links can be time consuming, but you should consider this as cleaning your house—sometimes it needs to be done.