Capability
Broken link monitoring: what a quiet outbound 404 actually costs in trust.
An outbound link that quietly rots to 404 costs the visitor who clicks it and the search engine that crawls past it. Broken link monitoring is the weekly probe that turns a 5-to-20-rotting-link-per-year problem into one email per event, well before next quarter’s audit.
- Weekly re-probe of every outbound link on the watchlist.
- One short email the second a link returns 404, 5xx, or fails the TLS handshake.
- Recovery email the week the link answers again.
- Tracks the URL, the old status, and the day it broke in every alert.
- No crawler to install on your server. The probe is from the outside.
How it works
Setup, in three beats.
Step 01
Give SiteGuardian the URL list, or let it find the visible links
Either paste a list of URLs you maintain yourself, or give it your home page and let it read the visible anchor links from there. Either way, the watch starts inside the next minute. The list is yours to grow over time.
Step 02
Let the weekly cadence find the next 404
Most small sites accumulate 5 to 20 broken links per year — a partner changed domains, a sponsor page redirected to a parked URL, a vendor went out of business and their blog 404s. The weekly cadence catches each one as it happens, with the URL, the old status, and the new status.
Step 03
Patch as you read each email, not at the next quarterly audit
A quarterly audit catches 20 broken links at once; the weekly cadence catches one per week. The weekly version saves you the sprint, the spreadsheet, and the next visitor who would have bounced at the 404. SiteGuardian handles the surfacing; you handle the fix.
What the alert actually says
One email. One URL. One timestamp.
Your link https://example.com/old-partner stopped answering on 2026-07-12 (HTTP 404). It was last healthy on 2026-06-21.Frequently asked
The broken link monitoring questions, answered flat.
Frequently asked
Related reading
Keep exploring.
Try it
Start monitoring my site.
Starter is $19 a month — one site, ten URLs, every-five-minute checks. Pro is $39 a month — three sites, fifty URLs, every-minute checks. Lifetime is $299 paid once and stays yours with every future update included.
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