Why Broken Links Hurt Your SEO (And How to Fix Them)

Every website accumulates broken links over time. Pages get deleted, URLs change, and external sites go offline. The result is a growing collection of 404 errors that quietly damage your site, for both visitors and search engines.

What Is a Broken Link?

A broken link is any hyperlink that leads to a page that no longer exists or cannot be reached. The server responds with an HTTP error code, most commonly 404 Not Found, but also 410 Gone, 500 Server Error, or connection timeouts.

Broken links fall into two categories:

Internal broken links: links within your own site pointing to pages you've deleted or moved without setting up a redirect.
External broken links: links to third-party websites that have since changed or shut down.

Both types hurt, but internal ones are entirely within your control.

How Broken Links Damage SEO

1. They waste crawl budget

Search engine bots have a finite budget for how many pages they'll crawl on your site per visit. Every request that returns a 404 is a wasted crawl: time the bot spent on a dead end instead of discovering and indexing your real content.

For large sites, this is a meaningful problem. If Googlebot consistently hits dozens of broken URLs on every crawl, it may deprioritize your site or miss newly published content entirely.

2. They bleed link equity

When another site links to a page on your site that no longer exists, the "link juice" (the SEO value passed through that link) goes nowhere. You had an asset (an inbound link) and it's now effectively worthless.

The same applies to internal links. If your homepage links to a product page you deleted, you're pointing PageRank into a void instead of flowing it through to your live pages.

3. They're a quality signal

Google uses a wide variety of signals to assess site quality. A site littered with 404 errors sends a signal: this site is poorly maintained. It's not the same as a direct ranking penalty, but quality signals compound over time.

4. They ruin the user experience

A visitor who clicks a link and lands on a 404 page is likely to leave. Bounce rates climb. Return visits drop. If a user found your site through organic search and immediately hit a dead link, they'll associate your brand with a broken experience, and that's not something you want.

How to Find Broken Links

The fastest way is to crawl your site the same way a search engine does. A crawler follows every link on every page and checks the HTTP response code. When it gets a 404 or other error, it records which URL failed and which page contained the link.

That's exactly what Dead Link Crawler does. Enter your URL, and it will:

Crawl up to 1,000 pages of your site
Check every internal and external link on each page
Report broken links with their HTTP status code, the anchor text, and the page they were found on

The whole process runs server-side, so there are no CORS issues and no browser extensions required.

How to Fix Broken Links

Once you have a list of broken links, the fix depends on the type:

For internal broken links:

If the page moved, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. This preserves link equity and fixes the user experience in one step.
If the page is gone for good and had no replacement, update the links pointing to it to point somewhere useful, or remove the link entirely.

For external broken links:

If the destination page moved, update your link to the new URL.
If the site is gone entirely, either remove the link or find a better resource to link to.
Use the Wayback Machine to find archived versions of pages that have disappeared. You may find an archived copy worth linking to, or a redirect to a new domain.

How Often Should You Audit?

For most sites, a monthly crawl is enough to catch link rot before it accumulates. High-traffic or frequently updated sites benefit from more frequent checks: weekly, or even after every significant content update.

The important thing is to make it a routine. Broken links are a normal part of the web; the difference between a well-maintained site and a neglected one is whether someone is catching them.

Ready to find broken links on your site? Run a free crawl →