/ GUIDE — 5 min read

How to find broken links on your site (and fix them in the right order)

Find every 404 and server error with Nosy Bat, see which page each one was found on, and export the list for whoever fixes it.

Why broken links matter

A broken link wastes a click. For a visitor it's a dead end; for a search engine it's a signal that the site isn't maintained, and the link equity flowing into that URL goes nowhere. Internal broken links are entirely yours to fix. External ones — links you make to other sites — can't be fixed at the source, but they can be updated or removed.

Nosy Bat finds both kinds in one crawl and, unlike a single-page checker, tells you where each broken link lives, so you don't have to search for it.

1. Start a crawl

Open Nosy Bat and go to New crawl. Paste your homepage URL, keep Mode on Spider (follow links), leave JavaScript rendering on Off (raw HTML) unless your site builds its links with JavaScript, and start. A few hundred pages take a couple of minutes; Nosy Bat obeys robots.txt and never sends more than two requests a second.

2. Open the Issues view

When the crawl completes, open Issues. Broken links sit in the Response codes family:

Internal client error (4xx) — pages on your site that return 404, 410 or similar
Internal server error (5xx) — pages your server failed to deliver
Broken external link (4xx) and External link server error (5xx) — links from your site to other sites that no longer work
No response — timeouts and refused connections

Each row shows how many pages are affected. Open it to see the URLs; under each one, Found on names the page that links to it. For the anchor text — and every other page linking to the same URL — open that URL on Pages and read its Inlinks panel.

The 404 is on /pricing, but the link to fix is on /services. Found on names that page and the anchor text.

3. Export the list

Use Exports → Broken links (CSV). Every row is one internal link: the source URL, the broken URL, the anchor text and the status code. This is the file you hand to a developer or a content editor; it needs no further explanation. Links to other sites have a file of their own, External links (CSV).

Every row is one link: the page it sits on, where it points, its anchor text and the status that URL returned.

Want this list on a schedule without lifting a finger? Every plan from Starter schedules crawls — weekly from Growth up. See plans →

4. Fix in the right order

Not every broken link needs the same fix:

The page moved → add a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one, then update the link anyway so visitors don't pay for the hop
The page is gone for good → remove or replace the link; let the URL return 410 if nothing should replace it
A typo in the link → correct the link; no redirect needed
An external site changed → update the link to the new location or remove it

A moved page gets a 301 and an updated link; a page gone for good loses the link; a typo is just corrected.

Start with the internal 4xx URLs that have the most inlinks — Pages sorts by Inlinks and by Link Score — because those are the links most visitors and crawlers hit.

5. Confirm, then keep watching

Run the crawl again, open Compare on the new crawl and choose the first one under Compare with: what you fixed lands in Resolved issues. Then add a schedule under Schedules — weekly from Growth up, monthly on Starter — with Email to workspace owner ticked under Export targets, so new broken links reach your inbox before your visitors find them.