Freqo Compass · Guide
Broken links and 404 errors
A link that leads nowhere frustrates your visitors and wastes the time search engines spend on your site. Here is how to find broken links and fix them.
Why it matters
- Visitors who land on an error page usually leave, often for good.
- Search engines follow your links to discover your pages. A broken link is a dead end, and pages only reachable through it may be found late, or not at all.
- Server errors (5xx) are worse: if they happen again and again, search engines may come back less often.
How to find them
Look at the pages marked “Not found (404)” in Google Search Console, and test your internal links regularly, especially after you rename, move or delete pages. Freqo Compass reads every page of your site each week, follows each link and lists the broken ones, with the page that contains the link.
How to fix them
- Correct the link if the page still exists under another address.
- If a page has moved, set up a permanent redirect (301) from the old address to the new one.
- If a page is gone for good and has no replacement, remove the links to it. A real 404 page is fine for content that no longer exists.
- Avoid chains of redirects: point your links straight to the final address.
What Freqo Compass checks
- Broken internal links, with the page that contains each one
- Pages that answer with a server error (5xx)
- Chains of redirects
- http:// addresses that do not redirect to https://
This is one of the 39 checks Freqo Compass runs on your site every week, each with an explanation of how to fix it. Discover Freqo Compass
Other guides
- Page titles and meta descriptions
- Real page speed (Core Web Vitals)
- Sitemap and robots.txt
- Images without alternative text
- Canonical tags
- HTTPS, www and redirects
- hreflang and page language
No tool can guarantee a position in search results, and neither do we.