Check any web page for broken links. In a matter of seconds, this tool checks which external or internal links of a webpage are broken. Broken links mean the links which return HTTP status code 404. Just enter any URL and check for broken links instantly.
The website broken links checker evaluates your page's links and finds out which of those links are incorrect or not working.
Broken link refers to the web page URL, which, when requested, gives a 404 response code. The 404 response code is meant to instruct the browser or bot that the requested web page does not exist.
First of all, the given URL is requested, then its response is scanned for any anchor links. When anchor links are found with anchor HTML tag, then those links (either internal or external) are each requested by our tool and checked either they return 404 response code or any other. If the page sends a 404 response code in HTTP headers, it means that the URL is incorrect or not configured to open properly.
Search engine bots often crawl various pages of a website to find new or indexable links. To find new URLs, bots look for anchor tags inside a page's source code and then adds those links to their list of crawlable URLs. Once they start crawling those newly found URLs, they analyze each URL's HTTP response code. If the URL returns 404, then bots do not add the specified URL to their index and even removes that URL from their index if it was already indexed earlier.
The answer is, "No." The broken links adversely affect the ranking of a website if search engines found too much of them. For instance, a site contains thousands of good URLs, which are not 404, and suddenly one day, all those URLs start returning 404 response code. Search engines will analyze and remove those URLs from their index, which will adversely affect the website traffic because many of those indexed pages were appearing in search results earlier, but after being removed from the index, those pages are no longer appearing in search, hence dropping the site's overall traffic.
To fix the website's broken links, you need to check your webpage with this tool. It finds every non-existent URL and tells you about it. After finding the list of URLs, you should either remove those anchor links from the subjected webpage or fix those links to enable them to open properly and return a 200 response code.