What Types of Broken or Harmful Links Can Dr. Link Check Detect?

Dr. Link Check checks every link it finds on your site in three passes: a broken-link check (malformed URLs, server timeouts, invalid SSL certificates, and error codes such as 404 or 500), a blacklist check for links to malicious content, and a soft-error check for pages that return 200 OK but still signal a problem. It applies these checks to internal pages, outbound links, and resource files such as images and style sheets, starting from a single start URL.

The three checks, in detail

Broken link check

This pass asks whether the link actually leads where it should. According to the site, each link is tested for:

• URL formatting — is the address properly formed?
• Server response time — does the server answer within a reasonable amount of time, or does it time out?
• SSL certificate validity — is the certificate valid, or will visitors hit a security warning?
• Return codes — does the response indicate an error, such as 404 for a missing page or 500 for a server error?

Blacklist check

Beyond whether a link works, Dr. Link Check asks whether it is safe. Each link is compared against blacklists for hosting malicious content. This matters because a link that loads fine can still expose visitors to malware or phishing, which the site describes as worse than a broken link.

Soft error check

Some pages return a 200 OK success code while the content itself says something is wrong — for example, a "page not found" message served with a success status. Dr. Link Check flags these soft errors so they don't slip through a check that only looks at status codes.

What gets checked

The bot starts from a start URL and crawls the HTML and CSS of the site, examining every link it can find. That covers:

Why the distinction matters

A status-code-only check catches 404s but misses two categories: links that resolve to harmful destinations, and pages that "succeed" while showing an error. Running all three checks per link is what lets the report reflect the actual experience a visitor would have.

Getting the results into a usable form

Results are presented from a high-level summary down to the exact location of each link in the code, and can be sorted, filtered, and exported to CSV for further work in Excel. Checks can also be scheduled to run daily, weekly, or monthly, with status reports sent by email — useful for catching link rot before visitors do.

For current plan details and limits, see the Pricing page on drlinkcheck.com.