I have to be honest with you. For a long time, I was publishing posts on my Blogger blog without ever checking for broken links. I would write a post, add a few links, hit publish, and move on. It never crossed my mind that some of those links could quietly die over time, or that some of the internal links I had been adding were pointing to pages that no longer existed the way I set them up.
It was not until I started paying closer attention to how my blog was performing that I realized something was off. My content was decent. My posting schedule was consistent. But the credibility I was trying to build felt shaky in a way I could not immediately explain. When I finally sat down and ran a proper check on my links, I found broken ones scattered across posts I thought were perfectly fine. That was the turning point for me.
If you are a Blogger user who has never done a link audit, this post is for you. I am going to walk you through exactly what broken links are, why they are a genuine problem for your blog, and how to find and fix them using tools that cost nothing.
What Are Broken Links and Why Do They Happen on Blogger
A broken link is any hyperlink on your blog that leads to a page that no longer exists or cannot be reached. When a visitor clicks it, they see a 404 error or a blank page instead of the content they expected. The same thing happens when Google's crawlers follow that link. The destination is simply gone.
On Blogger specifically, broken links happen for a few common reasons.
The first is URL changes. Blogger generates your post URL based on the title you write at the time of publishing. If you ever go back and change a post title after publishing, the URL does not automatically update to match. The old URL breaks, and any link pointing to it across your blog becomes dead. This catches a lot of Blogger users off guard because the behavior is different from what they might expect.
The second reason is deleted posts. If you remove a post from your blog, every internal link that pointed to it across your other posts becomes broken instantly. There is no automatic redirect or warning. The link just dies.
The third reason applies to external links, meaning links pointing to other websites. Those sites change their content, restructure their pages, or shut down entirely without giving you any notice. A link you added to an authoritative source two years ago might be pointing to a dead page right now, and you would have no way of knowing unless you checked.
There is also a situation specific to Blogger that trips people up. If you have connected a custom domain to your blog, any previously shared links that still use the old blogspot address can break or redirect in unexpected ways depending on how your domain settings are configured. If you have ever run into issues with your domain setup causing strange URL behavior, you are not alone. Problems with how a Blogger custom domain connects and redirects can sometimes contribute to broken link problems that are hard to trace without running a full link check.
Why Broken Links Hurt Your Blogger Blog
Some people treat broken links as a minor cosmetic issue. They are not. There are real consequences that affect both your readers and your search rankings.
From a reader experience standpoint, landing on a 404 page after clicking a link is frustrating. It breaks trust. If a reader clicks two or three links on your blog and keeps hitting dead ends, the impression they leave with is that the blog is poorly maintained. That is the opposite of the credibility you are working to build.
From an SEO standpoint, broken links affect how Google crawls and understands your site. When Googlebot follows a link and hits a dead page, it loses the trail. If that dead link was pointing to a piece of content you wanted indexed and ranked, the broken link is actively working against you. Beyond individual pages, a blog with many broken links sends a signal that the site is not being properly maintained, which factors into how Google evaluates your overall site quality.
There is also an AdSense angle worth mentioning. Google's AdSense policies expect approved sites to maintain a good user experience. A blog filled with broken links contributes to a poor user experience, and that matters both for keeping your AdSense account in good standing and for your ad performance. Visitors who hit broken links leave quickly. Quick exits hurt your engagement signals, and poor engagement tends to lower ad performance over time.
The Free Tool I Use to Find Broken Links on Blogger
When I first started looking for a way to check my links, I tested a few different tools. Some were complicated. Some required account signups. Some gave me results that included so many false positives that sorting through them felt like more work than just checking links manually.
The one that actually worked for me, and the one I still use, is Broken Link Checker. It is a completely free, browser-based tool. No download, no account, no credit card. You paste in your blog's URL, click the button, and it crawls your entire site looking for dead links.
What makes it genuinely useful rather than just convenient is the way it reports problems. Instead of giving you a raw list of error codes mixed in with everything else, it shows you only the broken links it finds. For each broken link, it tells you the exact page on your blog where the link appears, the anchor text used in the link, and the destination URL that is returning an error. That means you do not have to do any guesswork. You know exactly which post to open and exactly which link needs fixing.
It handles both internal and external links, which is important because both types can break and both affect your blog in different ways. The free version scans up to 3,000 pages, which is more than enough for most Blogger blogs. You can run it on any device, including your phone, since it is entirely browser-based.
How to Use Broken Link Checker on Your Blogger Blog
Using the tool is straightforward. Here is exactly how I do it.
Open your browser and go to brokenlinkcheck.com. You will see a single input field asking for your URL. Enter your blog's full address, including the https prefix. If your blog is on a custom domain, use the custom domain URL rather than the old blogspot address. Then click the button to start the check.
The tool will begin crawling your blog page by page. Depending on how many posts you have published, this can take anywhere from a few minutes to longer. You will see a progress indicator as it works through your pages. Do not close the tab while it is running.
Once the crawl is complete, the results appear on screen. If your blog has no broken links, it will tell you that clearly. If there are broken links, each one is listed with the information you need to fix it: the page it was found on, the broken URL, and the HTTP error code. A 404 error means the page does not exist. Other error codes may indicate temporary server issues on the destination site, which is worth noting separately from permanent broken links.
I recommend running this check at least once every few months as a routine part of maintaining your blog. If you have recently done anything that changes URLs, such as editing post titles, connecting or switching a custom domain, or removing old posts, run it immediately after those changes rather than waiting.
How to Fix Broken Links in Blogger
Once you have your list of broken links, fixing them is the straightforward part. There are four approaches depending on what caused the breakage.
Update the Link to the Correct URL
If the link is broken because you changed a post title or the destination page moved to a new URL, the fix is simply to update the link to point to the correct address. Open the post in Blogger, switch to HTML view, find the old URL in the code, and replace it with the correct one. Save and publish.
If the broken link points to an external site that has moved its content to a new page, search for the updated page and link to that instead. Many sites restructure their content over time but keep the information live under a new URL.
Replace the Link with a Better Alternative
If the original destination no longer exists at all and cannot be found anywhere, look for a different source that covers the same information. Replacing a dead external link with a working one from an equally authoritative source is better for your readers and better for your SEO than simply removing the link or leaving it broken.
This is also a good opportunity to reassess whether the external link is still the best reference for that point in your post. Sometimes content moves on and there is a more current, more relevant source available.
Remove the Link Entirely
If a broken internal link points to a post you have deleted and do not plan to replace, remove the link from your content. Keep the surrounding text if it still makes sense without the link, or rewrite the sentence so it does not feel like something is missing. A missing link is less damaging than a link that takes readers to a dead page.
Redirect Old URLs Where Possible
Blogger does not have a built-in redirect manager the way self-hosted platforms do. However, if a post has moved or been republished at a new URL, you can use Blogger's custom redirects feature under Settings to point the old URL to the new one. Go to your Blogger dashboard, click Settings, and scroll down to the Errors and redirects section. Enter the old path and the new path, and Blogger will handle the redirect for anyone who lands on the old URL.
This is particularly useful if you have previously shared links to specific posts on social media or other blogs. A redirect ensures those old links still work even after the original URL has changed.
Checking Your Blog Health Beyond Broken Links
Finding and fixing broken links is one part of keeping your Blogger blog in good technical shape, but it sits alongside other site health factors that all work together. A blog that loads quickly, links correctly, and serves content that Google can crawl without errors is in a much stronger position than one that handles only part of that equation.
If broken links are appearing frequently because you have been changing post URLs after publishing, that is a workflow habit worth changing going forward. Set your custom permalink in Blogger before you publish each post, based on your target keyword, and leave it alone after that. Changing URLs after a post is indexed creates redirect problems and broken links across any other content that links to it.
Another related habit is conducting a full audit of your internal linking structure every few months alongside your broken link check. Internal links are how you guide readers through your content and how Google understands the relationship between your posts. A broken internal link does not just frustrate a reader. It cuts off a path that Google was using to understand your blog's structure. If you have been using URL modifications on Blogger like the date removal method, those changes can sometimes create inconsistencies in how your internal links resolve, which is worth checking for specifically.
Page speed is another health signal that connects to how Google evaluates your blog as a whole. A blog that is fast, links correctly, and serves quality content gives Google everything it needs to crawl and rank your posts effectively. If you have not yet looked at what is slowing your blog down, working on your Blogger blog's loading speed alongside fixing broken links gives you two meaningful improvements in one maintenance session.
Using Google Search Console Alongside Your Link Checker
Broken Link Checker is excellent for scanning all the links on your site proactively. But Google Search Console gives you a different and equally important perspective: it shows you what Google has already discovered when crawling your blog.
Inside Search Console, go to the Pages report under Indexing. Look for pages flagged as Not Found (404). These are URLs that Google tried to crawl and got an error response. They might be old URLs that once existed and got linked to from other sites, internal links pointing to deleted posts, or URLs that broke during a domain migration.
The Coverage report also shows crawl errors that can help you identify where Google is hitting dead ends on your site. Used alongside Broken Link Checker, these two tools give you a complete picture: the link checker catches dead links on your live pages, and Search Console catches dead URLs that Google knows about from its own crawling history.
Getting comfortable with Search Console is one of the more valuable things you can do as a Blogger user. Beyond broken links, it surfaces indexing issues, search performance data, and technical errors that you would not find through any other free tool. The full list of free SEO tools worth using on your Blogger blog covers Search Console alongside several other tools that support this kind of regular maintenance routine.
How Often Should You Check for Broken Links
There is no single right answer, but a practical schedule that works for most active Blogger blogs is once every two to three months for a full crawl, and immediately after any significant change to your blog structure.
Significant changes include things like connecting or switching a custom domain, deleting old posts, bulk-editing post titles, or moving a large number of old posts to a different label or category. Any of those actions can create broken links that were not there before.
If your blog is newer and you are still in the phase of building out your content library, running the check monthly is not excessive. The earlier you catch a broken link, the less damage it does in terms of reader experience and crawl behavior. A broken link that sits on your blog for a week is a much smaller problem than one that has been there for six months while Google crawled past it repeatedly.
Once your blog reaches a stable size and you have settled into a consistent publishing routine without making structural changes, quarterly checks are usually sufficient to stay on top of any external links that have gone dead.
A Habit That Changes How You Manage Your Blog
Before I started checking for broken links, I thought of my published posts as finished. Once something was live, I moved on and focused on the next piece of content. Running that first full link audit changed how I think about maintaining a blog.
A blog is not a set of static documents. It is a connected system where each post links to others, where external sources change over time, and where structural decisions like URL changes ripple outward and affect pages you might not have touched in months. Treating your blog like a living thing that needs occasional maintenance rather than a publishing queue you add to and forget is what separates blogs that hold up over time from ones that quietly deteriorate.
The tools to do this maintenance are free. The time investment is manageable once you build the habit. And the payoff, in reader trust, in Google's crawl behavior, and in the overall health of everything you have built, is real and compounding.
Run your first check today. You might be surprised at what you find.
See you in my next post 😊
