Citare Tools · Free
Broken Link Checker (reclamation)
Find pages on your site that return 4xx but still receive inbound backlinks. Each one is a reclamation opportunity — fix the page or 301-redirect to recover lost link juice without doing any outreach.
Free. No signup. Cached 24h per domain. Top 20 candidates by backlink count, ordered desc.
Frequently asked
What does the Broken Link Checker actually find?
Pages on YOUR domain that return a 4xx HTTP status (404, 410, 403…) but still have inbound backlinks pointing at them from other sites. Each broken page with inbound links represents lost link juice — Google can't credit your site for those links because the destination is broken. Fix or 301-redirect each broken URL and recover the equity.
Why is this called "reclamation"?
Reclamation = recovering link juice you already earned but lost. A broken page that has, say, 50 inbound backlinks: those 50 sites already decided to link to your content. If you 301-redirect the broken URL to a relevant live page, Google passes that link equity to the new destination. No outreach required — just a redirect or page restore. This is one of the highest-leverage SEO fixes most sites have available.
How do I fix each broken page?
Three options, in order of preference. (1) Restore the page if it should still exist — sometimes a CMS migration accidentally killed a URL that's still relevant. (2) 301-redirect to the closest live equivalent — e.g. an old product page → its replacement, an old blog post → the updated version. (3) 410-Gone if the content is genuinely retired and there's no good destination. Whatever you do, don't leave it as 404 — the inbound links are silently failing.
What does the rank number mean for a broken page?
DataForSEO's 0-1000 score of the broken URL itself (computed from its inbound link strength before it 4xx'd). Higher = more lost equity. When prioritizing reclamation work, sort by rank desc — fixing a rank-500 broken page recovers far more juice than fixing five rank-100 ones. The tool shows up to 20 results sorted by backlinks count; the rank column tells you which to fix first within that list.
What's the difference between this and a generic broken-link crawler?
Generic broken-link crawlers (Screaming Frog, ahrefs site-audit's broken-link check) crawl YOUR pages and find outbound links from your pages that return 4xx — i.e. "my site links to dead external pages." This tool is the inverse: "OTHER sites link to dead pages on MY site." Both are valuable but they solve different problems. This one is specifically about reclaiming lost link equity.
How fresh is the data?
DataForSEO's backlink graph refreshes continuously, with broken-page detection updated as their crawler re-fetches each URL. Once you fix or redirect a broken page, expect it to drop off this list within 2-4 weeks as DFS re-crawls it and sees a 2xx/3xx. Citare caches the lookup for 24h so re-checking after a fix is instant from cache.