1. What broken links are and why they matter
A broken link is any hyperlink that points to a page that no longer exists or returns an error — most commonly a 404 (Not Found) response. They happen naturally over time as pages get deleted, URLs change, or external sites restructure their content. On a site that’s been live for a few years, broken links are almost inevitable without active maintenance.
From an SEO perspective, the impact has two dimensions. First, Google’s crawl budget: Googlebot follows every link it finds, and spending time on dead ends means less time crawling your live, valuable content. Second, link equity: internal links pass authority from one page to another. A broken internal link means that authority goes nowhere. Google’s own crawl budget guidance lists broken pages as one of the key things to clean up for efficient crawling.
2. Internal vs external broken links
There are two distinct types of broken links, and they need different fixes:
- Internal broken links point from one page on your site to another page on your site that no longer exists. These are entirely within your control and should be fixed promptly. They’re also the most damaging for crawl efficiency and internal link equity.
- External broken links point from your site to a page on someone else’s site that has been removed or moved. You can’t fix the destination, but you can update or remove the link on your end. These matter less for crawl budget but damage user experience — a visitor who clicks an external link and hits a 404 loses trust in your site.
Note that inbound broken links — links from other sites pointing to dead pages on your site — are a separate issue worth addressing through redirects, since they represent link equity arriving at a dead end.
3. How to find them
Google Search Console is the first place to check: go to Indexing → Pages and look for pages with a “Not found (404)” status. This shows you which URLs on your site Google tried to crawl and found missing — which is exactly what matters for SEO. It will also show you which pages link to those 404s, which tells you where to go to fix the source link.
For a more complete picture — including external links that break and links Google hasn’t crawled yet — a dedicated broken link checker crawls every page and every link on your site and reports all 404s in one pass. Running one on tools.keyforriches.com flagged several external links that had quietly gone dead within a year of publishing — a reminder that external sites change without warning and you’d never know without checking.
Scan your site with the Broken Link Checker
Enter any page URL and instantly see all links on that page, flagging any that return errors — so you can fix them before they cost you rankings or visitors. Free, no signup.
4. How to fix them
The fix depends on why the link is broken and what the right destination should be:
- Update the link — if the page moved to a new URL, update every link pointing to the old one. This is the cleanest fix and the right choice when the content still exists at a different address.
- Set up a 301 redirect — if you deleted a page that was receiving inbound links or had significant traffic, redirecting the old URL to the most relevant remaining page preserves the link equity. A 301 tells Google and browsers that the move is permanent.
- Remove the link — if the linked content no longer exists and there’s no good replacement, removing the link entirely is better than leaving a dead one. Update the surrounding text to make sense without it.
- Restore the page — in rare cases where a page was deleted by mistake or still has inbound links worth preserving, bringing it back is the right call.
Work through internal broken links first — they’re highest impact and entirely within your control. Then clean up external links, prioritising any that appear prominently in your content.
5. Preventing broken links going forward
Most broken links are created by the same two actions: deleting a page without redirecting it, and changing a URL without updating the links that point to it. Before you do either of those things, check what links to the page using Search Console or your broken link checker. If anything links to it, set up a redirect before the change goes live.
For external links, the only reliable defence is periodic checking — external pages disappear without warning. Running a site crawl every few months catches most problems before they accumulate. Keeping a spreadsheet of your most important external references makes it easier to spot when one needs replacing. The Google guidance on redirects is worth reading if you’re doing any significant site restructuring where links are involved.
