A broken link is a small thing to a visitor — an annoying dead end, maybe a bounce. To a search engine crawling your site, it's a small vote of neglect. Enough of them and it starts to color how the whole site gets evaluated.
Why Broken Links Hurt
When a crawler hits a 404, it wastes part of your crawl budget and can't pass authority through that path anymore. When a visitor hits one, they leave — and repeated dead ends signal a site that isn't maintained, which erodes trust for both users and search engines over time.
Broken links show up in a few forms:
- Internal links pointing to pages you've since deleted, renamed, or moved
- Outbound links to external sites that have gone offline or restructured their URLs
- Old backlinks pointing to a page of yours that no longer exists at that URL
The first two are entirely in your control. The third is worth fixing too — a 301 redirect can capture link equity that would otherwise just disappear.
A Simple Framework
- Run a full site crawl to identify every broken internal and outbound link
- For internal links: update the link or redirect the old URL to its closest live replacement
- For outbound links: replace the source, or remove the link if no good replacement exists
- For old backlinks pointing to a dead page: 301 redirect it to the most relevant current page
> Tip: Don't mass-redirect everything to the homepage. A redirect only preserves value when it points to a genuinely relevant replacement — otherwise it's just a softer form of the same dead end.
Common Mistakes
- Only checking for broken links once, instead of on a recurring schedule
- Redirecting broken pages to unrelated content just to avoid a 404
- Ignoring outbound links because "they're not my site's problem"
- Fixing the link but not checking why it broke in the first place (a site restructure, a deleted category, etc.)
Finding Them
Checking links manually doesn't scale past a few dozen pages. A broken links finder crawls the full site and flags every dead link at once, and a link analyzer is useful afterward to see how link equity is actually flowing once everything's cleaned up.
This is one of the few SEO tasks with almost no downside and a clear payoff — a quarterly link audit takes an afternoon and quietly protects everything else you've built.