How to Find Broken Links with Google Search Console

Broken links are what SEO nightmares are made of.

Well… there are other things too. But seriously, broken links on your website can make it more difficult for Google to crawl it and create a poor experience for your readers.

And that’s a recipe for dropped rankings and sales.

But fear not!

Google Search Console has the remedy that will help you to identify and fix your broken links. In this guide, I’ll show you how to find broken links on your website using Google Search Console.

We also created a complete guide to using Google Search Console, click the button below to download it (or keep reading to get your original question answered, that’s cool too).

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a tool used by SEO professionals to monitor website performance and for taking a look at how websites are performing in Google Search results.

One of the perks of using Google Search Console is that it can identify broken links so that you can make changes to fix your website. Google Search Console has a helpful tool called the 'coverage report’, which breaks down any issues with a website’s URL, including broken links.

Again, we wrote a complete intro guide to Google Search Console that you can download by clicking this button.

How broken links affect your website's SEO performance

Broken links can cause an avalanche of problems ranging from loss of revenue, increased bounce rate, low site ranking, and crawling/indexing problems.

Time is of the essence when it comes to fixing broken links since the bounce rate may increase because users won’t want to wait.

Customers won’t be likely to buy anything or do any desired tasks if webpages aren’t working because of broken links or 404 errors. When customers are bouncing from your site more, your site ranking is also likely to decrease because customers aren’t happy, pages aren’t loading, and Google isn’t able to crawl/index the site properly.

The Steps to identify broken links using Google Search Console

Finding broken links in Google Search Console is a quick and easy process. To identify broken links, follow the steps below:

1. Go to Google Search Console
2. Click on ‘Pages’ on the left sidebar to access page coverage report
3. Scroll down to the ‘Why Pages Aren’t Indexed’ section to view errors: This section lists any errors that have come up during the crawling/indexing process.
4. Look for any ‘404’ errors which would indicate a broken link

How often should I check for broken links on my website?

The best way to combat broken links is to prevent them from occurring at all with regular checkups. Ideally, it’s best to check your website for broken links at least once a quarter or so. If you publish frequently, or make changes to your website throughout the week, then monthly may be a better cadence to stay on top of any potential issues.

What are some common causes of broken links on a website?

Even when performing regular checkups for broken links, what should you be looking out for? It’s not like you’re intentionally breaking links on your site

Here are some symptoms to look out for that can cause broken links:

• Incorrectly Formatted URL: Something as minor as a misspelled word or adding an extra character in the URL can cause a webpage to return a 400 error, making the page unusable
• Destination Page No Longer Exists: Broken links can be caused by websites that were taken down or that are no longer functional.
• Broken Images: Broken images exist when an image link leads to a file/image that no longer exists.
• Domain Changes: Whenever a website changes its domain, links for the old domain will not work and return a 500 error indicating that the servers can’t be found.

How can I prevent broken links in the future?

Again, it’s not like broken links are an intentional mistake. They’re accidents that occur through typos or changes to a website without regard to the downstream effects.

Here are some good advice to follow to protect your website from getting broken links going forward:

• Perform Regular Checkups for Broken Links: Making a habit out of checking for broken links can help you spot irregularities before they turn into problems.
• Redirect to New URLs as Needed: If a URL becomes outdated, try redirecting to a newer page so that Google automatically knows to ignore the old link and not cause an error
• Avoid Domain/URL Changes: Making too many changes to your website URL can make broken links more likely. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

This is just the start, download our Google Search Console Guide

Identifying broken links is just one thing Google Search Console is good at, there are loads of others too like:

• Seeing what keywords your website ranks for
• Discovering new keywords to target
• Identifying your  best ranking opportunities

And more. Google Search Console can be overwhelming though (that goes for many of Google’s products), so we created an intro guide to Google Search Console to help show you around.

Click the button below to download our free Google Search Console guide.