Broken internal links

Internal links from the crawled pages, fetched to see where they land. A broken one is a dead end for visitors and a wasted crawl for search engines.

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Internal links are the links between pages of your own site: menus, footers, related articles, buttons. When one points to a page that no longer exists, visitors hit an error page and usually leave, and search engines waste crawl budget on dead addresses. Broken internal links typically appear after a page is renamed or deleted, a URL structure changes, or a migration rewrites paths without redirects.

How SiteScan checks it

While crawling, the scanner collects the internal links it found on the pages it visited but did not crawl itself. It then requests a sample of up to ten of them, following up to five redirects, and records where each one lands. A link that ends in a 4xx or 5xx status is broken: the row turns red and up to five broken paths are listed below it with their status codes. A 405 or 501 means only that the server does not accept HEAD requests, so it is not counted as broken. Links that work only after a redirect are reported separately as a smaller issue.

How to fix

For each broken path, find the pages that link to it and update the link to the current address. If the page was moved, add a permanent 301 redirect from the old address so external links and bookmarks keep working too. If it was removed for good, remove the link. The sample is small, so run a full crawl after large changes. More in the article on broken links.