--- title: "Broken Link Reports That Show You Where to Fix Them" description: "Most broken link reports dump 4,000 rows on you and call it a day. The `--output-type broken-links` flag in Black SEO Analyzer gives you the linking page, the anchor text, and the status code for every dead link." image: "https://cdn.blackseoanalyzer.com/blog-images/the-broken-links-report-that-actually-makes-sense.jpg" canonical: "https://www.blackseoanalyzer.com/en/blog/the-broken-links-report-that-actually-makes-sense" language: "en" --- # The Broken Links Report That Actually Makes Sense By [Seth Black](https://www.blackseoanalyzer.com/en/about) · Published December 29, 2025 · Updated September 16, 2026 ![The Broken Links Report That Actually Makes Sense](https://cdn.blackseoanalyzer.com/blog-images/the-broken-links-report-that-actually-makes-sense.jpg) Broken link reports are one of those things every SEO tool brags about. You run the crawl, wait twenty minutes, and get a CSV with 4,000 rows and no clue what to do next. Sort by URL? Sort by status code? Start at the top and work down until you retire? I got tired of that, so the `--output-type broken-links` flag in Black SEO Analyzer works a little differently. ## What the report actually gives you The CSV is still there - I’m not taking your spreadsheet away. But each broken link comes with context that actually tells you something: - **The linking page** - so you know where to go fix it - **The anchor text** - so you can find the link on that page without view-source spelunking - **The status code** - because a 404, a 410, and a 500 are different conversations That context is what lets you decide what to fix first, which is the part I care about most. ## Why criticality matters Say your crawler comes back with 312 broken links. That number alone is enough to make you want to close the tab and pretend you never ran it. But you open the report anyway and start at row one. Row one is a dead link to a Wikipedia article from a blog post you published in 2019 about, I don’t know, responsive web design trends. Nobody reads it. Nobody links to it. The dead Wikipedia reference is annoying but not urgent. Row two is your contact form button pointing at `/contact-us-new-final-v2` which returns a 404. Those two links are not the same kind of problem. One costs you sleep. The other costs you customers. But in most tools they show up as siblings, sorted alphabetically, waiting patiently for your attention. The report doesn’t make that call for you, but the linking page and anchor text columns make it a fast call. Here’s what I check: - Is the broken link in your main navigation? - Is it in the footer (which means it’s on every page)? - Is it on a high-traffic page? - Is it a CTA, a form action, or a button that users are supposed to click? - Is it an internal link to a page that used to exist and probably still should? A dead link in the header of your entire site is a fire. A dead external link in a footnote from four years ago is a chore. A few minutes with the report tells you which is which. ## Internal vs. external links are different problems Internal broken links are yours to own - you control both ends, so you can just fix them. External ones are a different call every time. Sometimes the Wayback Machine snapshot is fine. Sometimes you swap in a different source. Sometimes the whole reference is stale enough that you just cut it. So the first thing I do with the CSV is split it by domain. Working them as one list pretends they’re the same type of work, and they’re really not. If you want to audit all the links on a specific page before running a full crawl, you can [scan and validate every link on a single webpage](https://www.blackseoanalyzer.com/en/blog/how-to-quickly-see-all-links-on-a-webpage) without triggering a site-wide crawl. ## The linking page column Sounds obvious. But most tools hand you the broken URL and make you reverse-engineer where it actually lives on your site. The page containing the broken link is the one you have to open and edit, and that’s the column Black SEO Analyzer puts first. No detective work. And if the same dead link appears on fifty pages (hello, footer), you’ll see all fifty. ## Running it ```bash black-seo-analyzer --url-to-begin-crawl https://yoursite.com --output-type broken-links --output-file broken-links.csv ``` That’s the whole command. What you get back is a CSV with one row per broken link per page: the linking page, the broken URL, the anchor text, and the status code. Sort it by the broken URL and the nav and footer links show up as big blocks, because they’re on every page. If you’re coming from a tool like Screaming Frog and wondering how this compares, the [broken link detection on JavaScript-heavy sites](https://www.blackseoanalyzer.com/en/blog/screaming-frog-alternative-for-modern-audits) is one of the areas where the difference is most obvious. Fix the contact button today. Get to the 2019 blog post next quarter. Or never. I won’t tell. BSA tags every issue with a severity, so you can filter out the noise instead of wading through 300 warnings. [Try it free for 14 days](https://www.blackseoanalyzer.com/free-trial), no credit card. -Sethers About the author [Seth Black](https://www.blackseoanalyzer.com/en/about) Seth is a software engineer and engineering leader who builds bseoa, a Rust-based technical SEO crawler with a GUI and CLI. He writes about the crawling, rendering and indexing problems he runs into on real sites. [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/seth-black-tx/) · [GitHub](https://github.com/sethblack) · [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@SethBlack) [Back to Blog](https://www.blackseoanalyzer.com/en/blog) ## Discover hundreds of SEO Issues in Seconds Without Monthly Subscriptions Comprehensive technical SEO analysis powered by ML and 16 specialized modules. Optional AI-powered insights from Claude, GPT-4, or Gemini. Get actionable insights in seconds, and never pay monthly fees again. [Download Free Trial](https://www.blackseoanalyzer.com/en/free-trial) I use AI to generate images for my posts and for general editing, updates, and ironically SEO purposes. I used to draw all of the images for my personal blog (taleas) myself, but as the volume of content I produce has increased, I've turned to AI tools to help create visuals that complement my writing. I go out of my way to generate images that look strange, and don't represent real people. 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