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Broken links

Silktide tests the links on your pages and in your PDF documents, and reports the ones that don't work - links leading to error pages, missing content, or websites that can't be reached.

Links break for many reasons: the target page was deleted or moved, the URL was mistyped, or the destination website went offline entirely.

<!-- Page that no longer exists -->
<a href="https://example.com/deleted-page">Old article</a>

<!-- Invalid URL format -->
<a href="https://not a valid url">Malformed link</a>

<!-- Website that's offline -->
<a href="https://defunct-website.com">Dead site</a>

Why this matters

A visitor who clicks a broken link hits a dead end - usually an error like "404 Not Found" - and cannot reach the information they came for. Broken links frustrate users, erode trust in your content, and are read by search engines as a sign of poor maintenance, which can affect ranking. For people using , recovering from a dead end costs even more effort.

Links rot constantly as the web changes around you, so this is maintenance, not a one-off fix: pages you link to today will be moved or deleted tomorrow.

How to fix it

  1. Prioritize by traffic and importance - a broken link in your main navigation matters more than one in a ten-year-old news post.
  2. For each broken link, find where the content lives now and update the URL, or remove the link if the content is gone for good.
  3. For broken links pointing at your own site, also add a redirect from the old URL, which fixes every other site linking to it too.
  4. Not every broken link must be fixed - it is a judgment call. Some archived content, such as older PDFs kept for historical record, should stay as published; those findings instead of editing history.

How Silktide tests this

  1. Find all links on each page and in PDF documents.
  2. Extract the target URL from each link, removing any fragment identifiers (the part after #).
  3. Test each unique URL: check for malformed syntax, attempt to download the target directly, and if that fails, retry using a real browser (slower, but more reliable against bot detection).
  4. Classify each failure by confidence:
    • Certain - clear error responses such as 404 or 500.
    • Likely - timeouts and connection failures.
    • Potential - ambiguous responses that may indicate a problem.
  5. If the website's or firewall answers with a bot challenge (a "checking your browser" page) instead of the page, retry in a real browser, which usually passes it. A link that is still challenged is shown as Rate limited: Silktide could not find out whether it works, so it is not reported as broken, and it is tested again next time rather than remembered as working.

Troubleshooting

There are several reasons a link can work in your browser but fail our automated test:

  • Geographic restrictions - some websites block whole countries or regions, and Silktide's test location may differ from yours.
  • Blocking of automated traffic - many sites block cloud providers, data centers, or anything that looks like a bot, while allowing residential connections like yours.
  • Login and cookies - you may have a session that grants access; Silktide tests links logged out.
  • Rate limiting - sites may reject rapid repeated requests from one source.
  • Private networks - links that only resolve on a corporate VPN, campus, or government network.
  • Timing - the site may have been briefly down when tested and healthy when you checked.

To verify, try the link in a private browsing window while logged out, ideally from a different network. If you conclude the link is genuinely fine, approve the finding.

Testing links inside PDF documents is notoriously hard. PDFs don't define links in a consistent, unambiguous way, and different software - including tools by Adobe, Google, Apple, and Microsoft - can see different links in the same file, or none at all. The links Silktide reports for a PDF may therefore differ from what you expect.

Learn more

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