Checking your website for broken links
Broken links can negatively affect both your SEO performance and user experience. Learn how to identify and fix broken links on your ruachost.com website.
This guide explains two effective methods for finding broken links:
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Google Search Console – Automatically detects and reports broken links found by Google’s crawlers whenever they scan your site.
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W3C Link Checker – Manually scans your website for broken links and pinpoints the exact lines in your HTML where those links appear.
Method #1: Google Search Console
To continuously monitor your site for broken links using Google Search Console, follow these steps:
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Log in to your Google Search Console account.
| Note: If you don’t have a Google Search Console account yet, you can create one here. |
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Select your website property (for example, ruachost.com). The Search Console dashboard will open.
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In the left menu, click Crawl, then select Fetch as Google. From here, you can request Google to crawl specific pages on your website.
| Note: The process is not instant — it may take up to a week for Google to crawl and update your site data. |
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Once Google has crawled your site, go to Crawl → Crawl Errors.
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Under URL Errors, you’ll see any broken links or missing pages detected during the crawl.
Method #2: W3C Link Checker
To manually check your site for broken links using the W3C Link Checker tool:
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Visit the W3C Link Checker.
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In the text box labeled Enter the address (URL) of a document that you would like to check, type the URL of the site you want to scan (for example,
https://ruachost.com). -
To view only key results, select the Summary Only checkbox.
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To include linked pages in your scan, select Check linked documents recursively and specify the recursion depth (the number of levels to check).
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Click Check. The tool will begin scanning and display broken links as it processes each page.
