🗺️ Overview
Site Auditor scans your website and flags technical issues — including broken links (404 errors) — that can hurt your search rankings. This article explains how to locate crawl issues and 404 errors inside Site Auditor and what you can do to resolve them.
🧭 How to Navigate to Site Auditor
Follow these steps to open Site Auditor from any page in Search Atlas:
- Log in to your Search Atlas account.
- Look at the left sidebar and click OTTO SEO, then select Site Audit (Site Auditor) from the nested menu.
- If you have more than one project, select the correct website for the project you want to audit.
- Wait for the dashboard to load. If a crawl has already been run, your results will appear immediately. If this is your first visit, initiate a new crawl using the option available on the dashboard.
Note: A crawl may take a few minutes to complete depending on the size of your website. Wait for the crawl to finish before reviewing results.
📋 How to Find Crawl Issues
Once the crawl is complete, your results are displayed on the Site Auditor dashboard. Here is how to locate your issues:
- On the main Site Auditor dashboard, look for the section that lists detected problems. This is where every crawl issue is reported after scanning completes.
- Browse through the issues list to surface 404 or broken link errors specific to your site.
- Click on any issue to expand it and see further details about the affected URLs.
Tip: If you see no issues listed but expect problems, check whether the crawl finished successfully. If the crawl is still running, wait for it to complete and then refresh the page.
🔗 How to View 404 Broken Link Details
Once you have located 404 errors in the dashboard, Site Auditor provides additional information to help you understand the scope of the problem:
- Broken destination URL: The page that returned a 404 error.
- Referring page: The page on your site that contains the broken link.
Reviewing these details tells you exactly which pages you need to edit in order to resolve each error.
🛠️ How to Fix 404 Errors
There are two main ways to fix a broken link, depending on whether the destination page exists or not:
- If the destination page has moved: Set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. This preserves link equity and automatically sends visitors to the correct page.
- If the destination page no longer exists: Edit the linking page and remove or update the broken link so it points to a valid, relevant URL instead.
After making your fixes, return to Site Auditor and run a new crawl to confirm the 404 errors have been resolved.
If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type human teammate to be connected with a member of our team.