How to find and fix broken links in 1C-Bitrix

1C-Bitrix does not break links in a unique physics. It breaks them the way a large CMS with a catalog, a composite cache, and a “SEO” module always does: the page you see is not the file you edited.

What actually 404s

• Catalog / SKU URLs after a 1C exchange or a filter rewrite. The card is gone; the listing still links.
• Infoblock detail pages deleted in the admin, left in the menu, in news, in the footer.
• SEO module “smart” 404 that sometimes answers 200 with a template. That is a soft 404, worse than an honest 404.
• Composite / CDN serving an old HTML that still has the dead href. You “fixed it.” The edge did not.
• .urlrewrite / urlrewrite.php after a section was moved. One 301 short. Three hops — a redirect chain.

How to find them

Do not start in the admin. Start on the rendered page: home, section, product, news item. Advanced Broken Links Search reads a[href] and images in the browser, including bits Bitrix assembled from several components.

Then a whole-site crawl from the canonical https host. Composite sites lie if you crawl the HTML Bitrix has not rebuilt. After a menu change, hit “clear composite” (or wait for TTL) and crawl again.

Search Console is the backlog Google already walked. The crawl is what the site ships now.

How to fix

1. Restore the element, or 301 the old URL onto the living analog (same product, parent section, not always /).
2. Fix the source: menu, include area, news, catalog — not only the one page you had open.
3. Clear composite and CDN. Recheck one URL in the extension before you close the ticket.
4. sitemap.php / sitemap files must not list the corpse. A sitemap 404 is a second product.

Bitrix sites for shops and bank marketing share this: the CMS is large, the href is still just HTML. Scan that.