How to Find and Fix Broken Links on Your Website (Easy Guide)

Imagine you are driving down a road, following signs to a beautiful store. Suddenly, the road stops completely, and there is a giant hole in the ground. You cannot go forward, and you cannot get to the store. You feel annoyed, turn your car around, and go home.

On the internet, this exact same thing happens when a user clicks on a link that does not work. Instead of a store, they see a big, empty page that says "404 Error: Page Not Found." In the world of website management, we call these Broken Links.

As someone who spends hours every week auditing and analyzing website performance, I can tell you that broken links are silent killers. They drive away your visitors and make Google lose trust in your domain. In this simple guide, I will show you exactly how to find these bad links and fix them fast.

What is a Broken Link?

A broken link is a clickable button or piece of text on a webpage that points to a destination that no longer exists.

Links usually break for three basic reasons:

1. A Typo: The website owner misspelled the web address when creating the link (for example, typing yoursite.cm instead of yoursite.com).

2. Deleted Pages: The page you linked to was deleted or moved to a brand-new address, but the old link was never updated.

3. Changed Domain Names: A website you linked to changed its name or closed down completely.

Why Google AdSense Dislikes Broken Links

When Google's review bots inspect your website for AdSense approval, they check how easy your site is to navigate. If their automated crawler clicks on your menu tabs or article links and hits a "404 Not Found" page, it instantly signals Low Value Content.

To Google, a site with broken links looks neglected and messy. Advertisers do not want their premium ads displayed on a website that feels broken or abandoned. Clean links show that you are an active, trustworthy publisher who cares about your audience.

Step-by-Step: How to Find and Fix Them

You do not have to click every single link on your website manually to see if it works. That would take days! Instead, use this simple workflow:

Step 1: Run an Automated Link Scan

Use an online technical tool to scan your entire domain. The tool will crawl all your pages in a few seconds and give you a neat report showing every broken URL and exactly where it is hidden inside your content.

Step 2: Fix Typos Immediately

Look closely at the broken report. If a link is broken simply because of a spelling mistake, log into your website dashboard, edit the post, fix the letters, and save it.

Step 3: Change or Delete the Link

If you linked to an external website that has closed down completely, you have two choices. You can either replace it with a link to a new, active website that has similar helpful information, or you can remove the link completely so it turns back into regular, non-clickable text.

A Real-World Lesson: My Cleanup Experience

Let me share a quick story from my technical optimization work. Last month, I was helping a friend review an educational blog. The blog had over 100 articles, but the traffic was dropping, and search engines were ignoring the newer posts.

I ran a quick link audit on the domain. To our surprise, we discovered 42 broken links! Most of them were old links pointing to external websites that had gone out of business years ago.

We spent an hour going through the report. We deleted the dead links and updated the internal paths. Within just two weeks of cleaning up those dead ends, the search engine bots crawled the blog completely. Because the pathways were clean, the site's overall search presence improved, and the pages loaded much more reliably for users.

Conclusion: Keep Your Pathways Clean

Finding and fixing broken links is not something you do just once. It is a healthy habit you should practice every few weeks to keep your online platform in perfect shape.

When your website pathways are completely clean, human visitors can browse your articles smoothly, and Google’s AdSense reviewers can explore your pages without getting stuck. This high level of care proves your platform provides a top-tier user experience.

Don't forget!

"Want to make sure your website is completely free of dead ends? Use our free Link Analyzer Tool on Rankests to instantly find and fix broken links today!"