404 Checker & Broken Link Scanner

A broken link is a link that leads nowhere useful. Usually that means a 404, sometimes a 410, a server error, or a site that doesn't answer at all. Visitors hit a dead end, and crawlers spend a request on a page that isn't there. There are two different jobs hiding behind "404 checker," and they need different tools. One is "which links on this page are broken?" The other is "which of these 150 URLs are dead?" Scrawl has a tool for each: the Broken Link Checker for the first, and the Bulk Status Checker for the second. This guide covers when to use which, how to read the results, and the order to fix things in. What counts as a broken link The HTTP status code tells you what happened when the link was requested. 2xx (usually 200). The page loaded. Not broken. 3xx (301, 302, 307, 308). The URL redirects somewhere else. Not broken, but worth updating if it's your own link. 404 Not Found and 410 Gone. The page doesn't exist. This is the classic broken link. Other 4xx, like 401 or 403. Access is refused. Sometimes that's a real problem, sometimes the server is just blocking automated requests. 5xx. The server failed. Could be temporary, could be a dead site. No response. Timeouts, DNS failures, SSL errors. The link may as well be broken for anyone clicking it. Google's page on how HTTP status codes affect its crawlers says it treats all 4xx errors except 429 the same way: the content doesn't exist, and URLs that were indexed get dropped over time. It also says a page that returns 200 but shows an error message can be flagged in Search Console as a soft 404. So "the server said 200" isn't the whole story. Job…