Playbook: clear a site of broken links in one afternoon

Playbook: clear a site of broken links in one afternoon

Don't just crawl and panic at 400 errors. Triage:
— Crawl, then filter 404s by inlink count — fix the 20 pages with most internal links first
— Separate internal 404s (fix the link) from external (swap or remove the target)
— Check redirect chains too; a 3-hop 301 leaks crawl budget even though it "works"
— Export the fixed list and re-crawl to confirm, don't trust the first pass

Screaming Frog
👍 free to 500 URLs, redirect-chain report, full control
👎 desktop app, $259/yr to remove the cap, steep first hour

Ahrefs Site Audit
👍 cloud, scheduled re-crawls, prioritized by traffic
👎 bundled in $129/mo plan, less granular than Frog

Verdict: Frog for a deep one-time sweep, Ahrefs if you want it monitored monthly.

Best for: webmasters inheriting a messy legacy site.

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