How To Find Broken Links Using The SEO Spider

You can use the Screaming Frog SEO Spider for free (and paid) to check for broken links (the http response ‘404 not found error’) on your website.

Below is a very quick and easy tutorial on how to use the tool as a broken link checker. First of all, you’ll need to download the SEO Spider which is free for crawling up to 500 URLs.

You can crawl more than 500 URLs with the paid version. The next steps to find broken links within your website can be viewed in our video, and tutorial below.

1) Crawl The Website

Open up the SEO Spider, type or copy in the website you wish to crawl in the ‘Enter URL to spider’ box and hit ‘Start’.

2) Click the ‘Response Codes’ Tab & ‘Client Error (4XX)’ Filter to View Broken Links

You can wait until the crawl finishes and reaches 100%, or you can just view 404 broken links while crawling by navigating to the ‘Response Codes’ tab and using the filter for ‘Client Error 4XX’.

There are two ways to do this, you can simply click on the ‘tab’ at the top and use the drop down filter –

Alternatively you can use the right-hand window crawl overview pane and just click directly on ‘Client Error (4xx)’ tree view under the ‘Response Codes’ folder. They both show the same results, regardless of which way you navigate.

This crawl overview pane updates while crawling, so you can see the number of client error 4XX links you have at a glance. In this instance above, there are 11 client errors which is 0.12% of the links discovered in the crawl.

As a lazy alternative, the ‘Issues‘ tab will also alert you to any issues, warnings, or opportunities found in a crawl.

3) View the Source Of the Broken Links by Clicking the ‘Inlinks’ Tab

To know the source of the broken links discovered (which URLs link to these broken links), click on a URL in the top window pane and then click on the ‘Inlinks’ tab at the bottom to populate the lower window pane.

‘From’ is the source where the 404 broken link can be found, while ‘To’ is the broken link. You can also see the anchor text, alt text (if it’s an image hyperlinked), and whether the link is followed (true) or nofollow (false).

4) Use the ‘Bulk Export > Response Codes > Client Error (4XX) Inlinks’ Export

If you’d rather view the data in a spreadsheet you can export both the ‘source’ URLs and ‘broken links’ by using the ‘Bulk Export’, ‘Response Codes’ and ‘Client Error (4XX) Inlinks’ option in the top level menu.

This should cover the majority of cases for finding broken links on a website.

However, the ‘source’ URL is the very last page to link to the 404 error page. If the ‘source’ is a redirect, the ‘Type’ column will say ‘HTTP Redirect’ for example.

To find the original source page of these errors, we recommend using the ‘All Redirects‘ export under ‘Reports > Redirects > All Redirects’. Open up the report and filter the ‘final status code’ column to ‘404’. The ‘Source’ is the original source page, and the address is the last source.

Crawling a List of URLs For Broken Links

If you have a list of URLs you’d like to check for broken links instead of crawling a website, you can upload them in list mode.

To switch to ‘list’ mode, click ‘mode > list’ in the top level navigation and you’ll then be able to choose to paste in the URLs or upload via a file.

The crawl depth is automatically set to ‘0’ in list mode, so it only crawls the URLs uploaded.

Find Broken ‘Jump Links’

Jump links are a useful way to link users to a specific part of a webpage using named anchors on a link. These broken bookmarks can’t be found in the same way as above, as they don’t respond with a 404 status code.

You’ll need to enable ‘Crawl Fragment Identifiers’ located in ‘Config > Spider > Advanced’, crawl the website, and then view them under the ‘URL’ tab and ‘Broken Bookmark’ filter.

Hopefully, the above guide helps illustrate how to use the SEO Spider tool to check for broken links efficiently.