Best Online Broken Link Checkers 2024

OnPage SEO has become a very important aspect in order to rank for profitable keywords. Google rewards fresh content and websites that try to provide the best user experience possible. This also includes fixing broken links on a regular basis and making sure the user doesn’t end in nirvana, getting disappointed and never visit your site again. The problem is even bigger when some of your affiliate links are broken. When was the last time you have checked if all of your Amazon Links are linking to an available product, not to mention if all your Affiliates Tags are properly set? Who knows how much commission you have lost already…

But don’t worry, nowadays we have very valuable tools at our disposal which give you the needed peace of mind to focus on the essential parts of your business. Could you imagine checking all your links every sunday on a manual basis? Me neither..

I have compiled a list of the best Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions to help you improving your Onpage SEO.

SaaS? This means that these tools run in the cloud and are accessible 24/7 from every device that has Internet Access. You don’t need to install Software and don’t need a new Computer to run these tools 🙂 They are working for you while you sleep.

How I Tested:

I’ve let them scan one of my blogs (https://buildyoursmarthome.co) with a lot of pages and old links and compared the results. Key criteria where completeness, usability, speed. Furthermore I checked all the additional options of each software and compared the pricing model. At the bottom of this page you will find the conclusion and the winners of the categories. Note: In the beginning I blurred out the URL on the images, but later decided to just show it 😉

Broken Link Checkers

1. captaincrawler.com

Captain Crawler presents you with a very modern SaaS-like design. It looks by far the most professional of all the tools I have tested. It is a brand new tool and has basically zero rankings on Google right now. I luckily found it via Twitter and let me tell you – this tool is a beast!

The first tab is the “Pages” tab, which is actually an extremely powerful OnPage SEO tool in itself, because it lists all the pages of your Website with the according Title and Meta Description and… the Headline Structure! This is so important as Google Values a clean Page Structure and likes numbered Headline Lists even more.

The tool found a whopping 52 Broken Links! I can already spoil that all the other tools didn’t even come close. It also detected the highest number of pages on my blog. And do you see the “Amazon Affiliate Links” Tab? Yes, that is right , it also checks your Amazon Links for free!

The Amazon Affiliate Links Tab is a killer feature. It lets you immediately see if your affiliate tags are correct, if the product is still available, if the ratings are ok, and so on…In my case I have discovered that my VA messed up some tags, and also mixed the amazon locations (amazon.com with amazon.de). Captain Crawler checks the links like a real person would, also showing you the Availability Status in the same language like your visitor will read. This lets you immediately discover any inconsistencies. For maximum profits you should consider removing all products that are Unavailable as this provides a bad User Experience!

This tool is insane and do you know the best part? It is FREE! You just need to register and confirm your E-Mail to see more than 10 results per tab. But then it also lets you export the results via CSV. Very very powerful feature!

Website: https://captaincrawler.com /

2. brokenlinkcheck.com

This tool is one of the oldest players in this niche which is reflected in the outdated design of the page. But design is not everything as our focus is on functionality. The site makes its purpose very clear, which is why you see “Online Broken Link Checker” everywhere. It seems to work as this site seems to rank consistently #1 for “broken link checker”.

The scan is completely free for up to 3000 pages. No need for registration, payment or anything. Just enter your url, enter a captcha and press the button. There is also a paid version which supports more than 3000 pages, individual pages or subfolders as well as automated scanning and reports. Unfortunately there is no public information on pricing for the premium model.

The Scan was fairly quick only taking about 5 minutes. It detected 176 internal pages and found 11 broken links. Not bad, but we have seen before that there are more pages on my blog. On to the next contender…

Website: https://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/

3. Dr. Link Check

Dr. Link Check looks way more like a SaaS. Modern Design and very compelling Landing Page. The free version is capped by Link Checks and not by Page Checks. This allows for 1500 free Link Checks before you need to pay. As Dr. Link Check not only checks normal anchor links (<a href=””) but also CSS , Images, Javascript, iFrames,etc… this limit gets exhausted pretty quickly. I mean this is not a bad thing as it gives your site a complete check up (like a doctor 😉 ) but made the free version for my case a bit useless. Especially since it doesn’t differentiate between internal and outbound links. The primary focus of this test is to check outbound links.

But hey, nothing in life is free. I will test the paid version soon.

The dashboard looks very nice and reminds me of a spaceship. For my taste it was a bit overwhelming , but I know that a lot of people look for this very professionalism and polish in a tool. I like simplicity with the essential functions in focus, which is why I was a bit disappointed that the Free Scan merely found 4 Links with errors. They also mix pages with scripts and resources, which makes it difficult to keep them apart. I like to know how many pages my blog currently has.

But as I mentioned before as Dr. Link Check does much more than checking only outbound links, it is fair to pay for that kind of service.

4 Broken Links that look familiar from our first test

Website: https://www.drlinkcheck.com/

4. Dead Link Checker

The design is clean and minimalistic but nothing spectacular. There is again a free version without registration, which is capped at 2000 Link Checks. But this time you also have the possibility to check single webpage. Why checking a single page you might ask? If you haven’t heard of the Broken Link Backlink SEO strategy yet, you might want to read about it here. A quick explanation would be: You don’t check your own sites for broken links but rather the sites of the strong competitors. Whenever there is a broken link you mail the owner and try to stuff that link by providing a link to your own website. Smart, isn’t it 😉 Single Page Broken Link Monitoring helps you in being one of the first to notice when a new opportunity comes up. Instead of scanning all competitors all day once a year , you wait in the shadows like a Ninja.

The free scan found 58 Broken Links on my blog. Wow, remarkable result. But not so fast. The problem is that the scan was too fast, and amazon.com blocked requests from “Dead Link Checker” after a while, which resulted in the “503 Service Unavailable” for a lot of my affiliate links. Excluding these results, the free check found about 10 broken outbound links on my blog.