How to monitor for broken links
Broken links frustrate visitors, waste crawl budget, and quietly erode SEO. They accumulate as pages move and external sites disappear. Automated monitoring re-checks links on a schedule so you catch them before a client does.
How link checking works
A crawler extracts the links from a page, requests each one, and flags any that return a 4xx or 5xx status. It should skip mailto/tel/anchor links, de-duplicate, and cap how many links it hits so a large site doesn't turn into a runaway crawl.
Internal vs external links
Internal broken links are yours to fix immediately. External ones break when other sites change — monitoring surfaces them so you can update or remove them before they pile up.
Keeping it cheap and polite
Good monitoring respects robots rules, rate-limits its requests, and uses lightweight HEAD requests where possible. That keeps it fast, cheap, and a good citizen on the sites it checks.
Frequently asked questions
Are broken links really an SEO problem?
Broken internal links waste crawl budget and hurt user experience. A few won't sink a site, but they signal neglect and add up over time.
How many links should a checker crawl?
Cap it. Checking the most important pages and a bounded set of links per page keeps the crawl fast and cheap while catching the majority of issues.
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