Broken links silently erode your site authority, waste crawl budget, and frustrate users. Screaming Frog is the fastest way to find and fix them. Here is exactly how I do it across enterprise sites with tens of thousands of pages.
Why Broken Links Matter for SEO
Every broken link on your site is a dead end for both users and search engine crawlers. When Googlebot hits a 404, it wastes crawl budget that could be spent discovering and indexing your valuable content. Broken internal links also leak PageRank into nowhere, weakening the authority distribution across your site. For large eCommerce catalogues and enterprise sites, this compounds quickly — I’ve seen sites with thousands of broken links haemorrhaging authority without anyone noticing. Fixing them is one of the most impactful quick wins in a technical SEO audit.
Step 1: Configure Screaming Frog for a Broken Link Audit
Open Screaming Frog and before you crawl, go to Configuration > Spider and ensure “Check External Links” is ticked. This tells the crawler to check both internal and external links for broken responses. For large sites, set the crawl speed to a reasonable rate (2–5 URLs per second) to avoid overloading your server. Set the user agent to Googlebot to see exactly what Google sees.
Step 2: Run the Crawl
Enter your domain URL and hit Start. For a site with 10,000 pages, expect the crawl to take 15–30 minutes depending on your settings. Screaming Frog will systematically follow every link on every page, recording the HTTP status code for each URL it encounters. Let it run to completion — partial crawls miss broken links buried deep in your site architecture. If you’re new to the tool, read our beginner’s guide to Screaming Frog first.
Step 3: Filter for Client Error (4xx) Responses
Once the crawl completes, go to the Response Codes tab and filter by “Client Error (4xx)”. This shows you every URL that returned a 404 Not Found, 410 Gone, or other 4xx error — these are your broken links. The most important column here is “Inlinks”, which tells you how many pages on your site link to each broken URL. Prioritise fixing broken links with the most inlinks first, as these have the greatest impact on your site architecture and authority flow.
Step 4: Export and Prioritise
Right-click the filtered results and export to CSV. Sort by inlinks descending to prioritise the highest-impact fixes first. For each broken link, click on the URL in Screaming Frog and check the “Inlinks” tab at the bottom — this shows you exactly which pages contain the broken link, making it easy to locate and fix them efficiently.
Step 5: Fix or Redirect
For each broken link, you have three options: update the link to point to the correct URL if the content has moved, set up a 301 redirect from the broken URL to the most relevant live page, or remove the link entirely if the content no longer exists and there’s no suitable replacement. For enterprise sites, I typically set up 301 redirects in bulk using a redirect mapping spreadsheet — it’s faster and more systematic than manually editing hundreds of pages.
Pro Tips From a Decade of Broken Link Audits
Schedule monthly crawls. Broken links accumulate constantly as content is updated, products are discontinued, and external sites go offline. Also check for soft 404s — pages that return a 200 status code but display a “page not found” message. These are invisible to standard broken link checks but just as damaging. Screaming Frog can detect these if you configure custom extraction rules to look for common 404 page text patterns. Addressing these issues regularly is part of solid crawl error management in Google Search Console.