Broken links — both internal and external — are a silent drain on your SEO performance. Internal broken links waste Google's crawl budget, fragment your PageRank flow, and frustrate users. External broken links signal poor site maintenance and, on high-authority pages, waste link equity.

Regular broken link audits are an essential part of SEO maintenance, especially after site migrations, CMS changes, or content updates.

Why Broken Links Matter for SEO

When Google's crawler follows a link and gets a 404 response, it registers a crawl error. Repeat this across many pages and Google may reduce the frequency with which it crawls your site. This slows down the indexing of new and updated content.

Beyond crawl budget, broken internal links prevent PageRank from flowing between your pages. A high-authority page with a broken link to a page you want to rank is wasting that link equity entirely.

External broken links (links pointing to other websites that no longer exist) signal poor site maintenance, which can subtly affect how Google assesses your site's quality.

Finding Broken Links

Use a site crawler to identify all broken links across your site. A good crawl will show you: - All internal 404 errors - All external 404 errors - 5xx server errors (broken due to server issues, not missing pages) - Redirect chains (not 404s but still problematic)

For large sites, prioritise fixing broken links on your most important pages first: homepage, main category pages, and your highest-traffic content.

Fixing Internal Broken Links

For each internal broken link, decide:

If the destination page still exists at a new URL — Update the link to point to the correct URL, or ensure a 301 redirect is in place from the old URL. If the destination page has been deleted — Update the link to point to the most relevant existing page, or remove the link entirely. If the destination page was never created — Create the page if it should exist, or remove the link.

The cleanest fix is always to update the link directly rather than relying on a redirect. Redirects work, but they add an extra HTTP request and a small amount of latency.

Fixing External Broken Links

For external links pointing to 404 pages on other sites: - Check if the content has moved to a new URL (try searching for the page title) - If you can find the new URL, update your link - If the content no longer exists, either link to an alternative source or remove the link - Consider linking to an archived version via the Wayback Machine where relevant

Setting Up a Custom 404 Page

A good custom 404 page minimises the damage when users do hit broken links. It should: - Make clear that the page doesn't exist (not just display a white screen) - Include navigation to your main sections - Include a search bar - Ideally, suggest related content based on the URL pattern

Rescuing Link Equity from 404s

If you have 404 pages that were previously indexed and had backlinks pointing to them, implement 301 redirects from those URLs to the most relevant live page. This recovers the link equity that external sites have built up pointing to those URLs.

Check Google Search Console's Coverage report for 404 errors that were previously indexed — these are the most valuable to rescue.

Monitoring Broken Links Over Time

Broken links accumulate over time as external sites change their URL structures, remove content, or shut down entirely. Set up regular crawls (monthly is practical for most sites) to catch new broken links before they accumulate.

Google Search Console also reports crawl errors and 404s directly — check it regularly and fix reported issues promptly.