Broken links are the digital equivalent of dead-end corridors in a shop: visitors walk in, hit a wall, and leave. Search engines respond similarly — a site riddled with dead links looks unmaintained, wastes the crawler's time, and quietly bleeds the link equity you worked to earn. The good news: fixing broken links is one of the few SEO tasks that is entirely within your control, costs nothing but time, and produces measurable results.
This guide is a triage workflow: how to find broken links, how to decide which ones matter, how to fix them properly, and how to turn other people's dead links into links for you.
Two kinds of broken links (fix them differently)
Internal broken links are links on your own site pointing to pages on your own site that no longer exist. These are entirely your problem and entirely your fix. Every internal 404 is a small leak: a visitor who bounces, a crawler that hits a dead end, and link equity that evaporates instead of flowing to a live page.
External broken links are links from your site to other people's pages that have died — an old statistic source, a supplier who redesigned, a blog that shut down. These matter less for rankings directly, but a page full of dead outbound links looks stale to both readers and Google. They're also your opportunity: when you find other sites linking to dead pages, that's link reclamation territory (more below).
Finding broken links: the three sources
Don't rely on one tool. Each catches different things:
- Google Search Console. Pages → "Not found (404)" shows URLs Google tried to crawl that don't exist. This is your highest-priority list — these are pages Google actually wanted. Export it quarterly.
- A crawler. Screaming Frog (free for small sites) or Sitebulb will crawl your whole site and report every internal link that returns a 4xx or 5xx. This catches what Search Console misses: broken links on pages Google rarely crawls.
- Your analytics. Check your top landing pages for 404 traffic. A page that 404s and still gets 200 visits a month from bookmarks or old links is a five-minute fix with real traffic value.
Ignore tools that email you "SEO health scores" about every redirect chain — fix the 404s first, then worry about chains.
Triage: which broken links actually matter
A site with 400 pages might have 60 broken links. You don't need to fix all of them today. Rank them:
- High traffic 404s — the page gets real visits. Fix first; every day is lost enquiries.
- 404s with backlinks — other sites link to a URL that no longer exists. You're throwing away link equity. Check with any backlink tool, even the free tier.
- Broken links on high-traffic pages — a dead link on your homepage or best service page damages more than one on a 2019 blog post.
- Everything else — fix in bulk during the next content tidy-up.
The fix recipes
For each broken internal link, pick one:
- 301 redirect — the dead page has a close equivalent (a renamed service, a merged product). Redirect to the nearest match, not the homepage. Homepage redirects for everything is a classic lazy fix that confuses visitors and wastes equity.
- Recreate the content — the page had backlinks or traffic and deserves to exist. Often the quickest win: republish something better than what died.
- Update the link — the target page exists under a new URL and the redirect was never set up. Point the link at the right place.
- Remove the link — the content genuinely has no equivalent. If the page adds nothing, a clean 404 is honest and fine.
For broken external links: find a live replacement (the site's new URL, an archived version, or a better current source) or remove the link. Don't 301 someone else's dead page through your domain — that's their redirect to set up, not yours.
Link reclamation: turning dead pages into links
Here's the advanced move. Use a backlink tool to find external sites linking to your dead URLs. Then email the site owner: "Your link to our page about X is broken — we've got a fresh version here if you'd like to point it there." Response rates vary, but you're offering a genuine fix to a genuine problem, which is the only kind of link outreach that consistently works.
The same technique works in reverse on competitors: find dead pages on rival sites with backlinks, create the missing content, and suggest it. It's slow, manual, and it works — which is why nobody writes about it as much as they should.
The redirect-map habit (where most broken links are born)
Here's the uncomfortable truth: most broken internal links aren't accidents — they're the aftermath of site changes nobody documented. A page gets renamed, a product discontinued, a blog migrated, and the links pointing at the old URLs are left to rot. The fix is procedural, not technical: every content change gets a redirect decision.
Keep a simple redirect log — a spreadsheet with three columns: old URL, new URL (or "removed"), date. When marketing renames a service page, the redirect is created the same day, not "when we get round to it". When a product is discontinued, the decision (redirect to the nearest alternative vs a proper 404) is made before the page comes down. Agencies and in-house teams that maintain this log have an order of magnitude fewer broken links than those that don't, and the log doubles as your migration safety net when you eventually redesign.
Keeping them fixed
Broken links are a maintenance problem, not a one-off project. Put a quarterly crawl on the calendar, add a 404 check to every site migration or redesign plan, and make redirects part of the content-deletion process: nobody should be allowed to delete a page without deciding where its URL goes. Thirty minutes of prevention beats an afternoon of archaeology.
Broken links are usually a symptom of a site that hasn't had a proper technical once-over. Our technical SEO audits map every dead end on your site and hand you the fix list in priority order. Want the full crawling picture too? Read our crawl budget and indexation guide. Get a free consultation.
