What is a broken link?
Links decay. Pages are deleted, sites are rebuilt with new URLs, domains lapse, a typo gets published, a file is moved. Any of those turns a working link into a broken one, usually returning a 404 Not Found, sometimes a 410, a server error or nothing at all when the whole domain is gone. The link can be internal, pointing within your own site, or external, pointing at someone else's, and it can be inbound, when another site links to a page of yours that has vanished. The slow accumulation of them across the web is called link rot.
Studies of large link collections have found a substantial share dead within a decade. On a brand site that has lived through a redesign or two, the proportion is often surprising.
Why it matters
Why a broken link matters
For visitors it is a small betrayal: the page said "see the film" and the film is not there. Enough of those and the site reads as abandoned. For search engines, internal broken links waste crawl budget and strand the equity that should have flowed to a working page, and a site littered with them looks poorly maintained, which is a quality signal in itself.
Inbound broken links are the expensive kind. A press article, a partner page or a directory linking to a URL you retired is sending real authority and real visitors to an error page. That is traffic and ranking power you earned and are throwing away, and it is the easiest thing in SEO to recover.
In practice
How a broken link works in practice
- 01
Find them regularly. A site crawler (Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, the site audit in Ahrefs or Semrush) lists every internal and outbound link that returns an error. Search Console's page indexing report shows URLs Google tried to reach and could not, which includes those linked from elsewhere. Backlink tools show which of your dead URLs still have other sites pointing at them.
- 02
Then fix them in order of value. Internal links get corrected at the source. Retired pages with inbound links get a 301 to the closest live equivalent. Outbound links to dead external pages get updated to a working source or removed. Build the check into the process after every migration, redesign or content purge, because that is when most of them are created at once.
Watch out
What people get wrong about broken links
Redirecting everything to the homepage. A visitor who clicked "holiday window films" and lands on the homepage is still lost, and Google treats irrelevant mass redirects as soft 404s. Redirect to the nearest relevant page or let the 404 stand with a useful error page. The other mistake is checking once. Links break continuously, and the audit after the redesign is a snapshot that is out of date within months.
Treating the 404 page as an afterthought. When a link does break, the error page is the last chance to keep the visitor: a search box, the main sections and a plain apology do more than a blank page with a code on it.
