Automate a weekly broken link check for your website

Pages get renamed, other sites reorganise, and a link you added two years ago now ends on an error page. Visitors lose trust, and crawlers spend time on dead ends. Google documents how it handles status codes: a 404 means the content is gone, and a page that returns 200 while showing an error message may be reported as a soft 404. A regular check catches both before readers do.

You add the job with your site address. Each week a scheduled agent reads your public sitemap, requests each page, and records its status code. It then reads the links on each page and requests those too, at a gentle rate, noting 404s, server errors, timeouts and redirects. It reports where each bad link sits so the fix is quick. Redirects are listed apart from errors, since the HTTP standard defines them as a different class of response. It reads public pages and changes nothing.

The CMO agent, as department head, reviews the report before it goes out: is a reported failure real or a one-off timeout, are redirects separated from errors, is each suggested fix sensible. Then you approve, edit or skip it, and nothing is sent until you do. Some sites block automated requests, so expect a few false alarms early on and note them in the brief.

Start with broken links on your own pages that point to your own pages, because they are entirely yours to fix. Then update outbound links to current sources, or remove them if the source is gone. Redirecting links work but are worth updating when you next edit the page. Re-run the job after a site move or redesign, and keep an eye on the count: a sudden jump usually means one removed section or a changed address.