Broken internal and external links return 4xx or 5xx responses. They waste crawl budget, create dead ends for users, and signal neglect on otherwise strong pages.
SEOHub’s site crawl and checklist surface broken-link issues from followed <a href> targets. The dedicated broken links tool is ideal when you want to probe a single URL or template quickly without a full unlock.
Start with key templates: home, primary nav, footer, pricing, and high-traffic blog posts. Footer and sidebar “resource” lists are frequent sources of rotting outbound URLs.
Prefer updating the href to a live equivalent over deleting useful navigation. Removing a link can orphan a page that still deserves internal equity.
For retired URLs, 301 to the best replacement — don’t leave soft 404s that return 200 with “page not found” copy. Soft 404s confuse both users and crawlers.
Check redirect quality with the redirect checker so fixes land in one hop on HTTPS rather than chains through old domains.
After cleanup, run a full-site scan to confirm broken-link counts drop and no new 404s were introduced by a nav redesign.
Automate prevention: add link checking to staging, and avoid hand-maintained URL lists in CMSs when a structured menu can stay in sync with published slugs.
Outbound affiliate and partner links die often. Schedule a quarterly pass on money pages; SEOHub and the broken-links tool make that pass measurable.
Distinguish crawlable HTML links from links only present in JavaScript widgets. SEOHub follows real anchors — if critical paths are JS-only, fix discoverability as well as status codes.
When a CMS renames a slug, search the codebase and content DB for the old path; one missed hardcoded URL recreates the same fail on the next crawl.
Keep a short log of intentional 410s vs 301s so the team does not “restore” a URL that was deliberately retired.