Introduction
If you’ve ever clicked on a link only to land on a 404 “Page Not Found” error, you’ve experienced a broken link firsthand. Although these online dead ends may appear to be small inconveniences, they can slowly affect the functionality of your website.
Not only can broken links frustrate visitors, but they can also send negative signals to search engines. Over time, this may damage your website’s authority, credibility, and search engine rankings.
We’ll go over how broken links affect SEO in this post, along with practical solutions for fixing and avoiding them completely.
The Direct SEO Damage of Broken Links
Wasted Crawl Budget
Search engines like Google assign every website a limited crawl budget. This determines how many pages their bots should be crawling and indexing during a visit. If your broken links are taking bots to pages that no longer exist, this is wasting precious crawl resources. Rather than being able to index your fresh blog posts, product pages or service areas, the bots encounter a wall, decreasing the likelihood that your new content rankings will come quickly.
Lost Link Equity
One of the strongest SEO signals is a link from another authoritative website. Those links (often referred to as votes of confidence) pass along link equity. However, when a backlink goes to a page that has been removed, the link equity disappears. In simple terms, you’re leaving SEO value on the table. The higher the number of high-quality backlinks you lose to broken URLs, the more difficult it will be for your pages to rank in search.
Negative User Experience
SEO is not solely about algorithms; it’s also about people. A broken link breaks this user journey and causes frustration. Most readers won’t try to find their way back; they will simply leave. A high bounce rate or short session duration signals search engines that your site doesn’t have useful and quality information. Over time, it will start to affect rankings.
Internal vs. External Broken Links
All broken links are not the same. Understanding the difference between internal and external broken links can help you determine which ones to fix first.
- Internal Broken Links: These are links inside your site that direct to pages that do not exist. They cause confusion for search engines and users, weaken the structure of your website, and decrease crawl efficiency. For instance, pointing to a blog post that you have since removed without creating a redirect.
- External Broken Links: These are external links to other sites that no longer exist or have migrated content. They don’t hurt your SEO as much as internal ones, but they damage credibility. The last thing you want to do is send people off site to a broken third party resource, which immediately degrades trust or your site appears outdated.
Common Causes of Broken Links
Broken links don’t just happen. They are a sign of something bigger, and the first step in preventing them is knowing what the common causes are.
- URL Changes: This is the number one cause of broken internal links. You might have changed the URL of a page to help your SEO or brand and forget to place the redirect from the old page URL to the new one. Now what happens is all old internal and external links pointing to the old URL will return a 404 page.
- Deleted Pages: Sometimes a page is no longer relevant and you simply remove it from your CMS. If you don’t have a plan to redirect or eliminate every link pointing to it, those links will be broken. This happens all the time on big websites that often prune old content.
- Typographical Errors: A broken link can result from a simple human error made while adding the link manually. A minor typo can make a link ineffective, whether it’s a misspelled word, a missing character, or an extra slash in the URL.
- External Site Changes: This is a reason that’s often out of your control. A third-party website that you have a link to has redirected or no longer exists. Since you can’t control other people’s websites, you need to periodically evaluate the health status of your external links in order to avoid such issues.
Finding and Fixing Broken Links
Maintaining a healthy website requires proactive broken link management. Thankfully, there are numerous efficient methods and tools for finding and fixing them.
How to Find Them:
- Google Search Console: Start with Google Search Console first. Go to the “Pages” report and you’ll see a list of URLs that Googlebot tried to visit but got a 404 Not Found when they tried it. This report is incredibly valuable because it demonstrates exactly what Google sees and considers to be a problem.
- SEO Audit Tools: These tools will crawl through your site the same way that a search engine bot would and provide you with the report of internal & external broken links you have on your website, allowing you to quickly find the issues.
How to Fix Them:
- 301 Redirects: Implementing a 301 redirect is the most powerful and effective solution. This permanent server side redirect automatically sends both users and search engines to the new page that you have specified. This ensures that no SEO value is lost while simultaneously improving the user experience and maintaining the link equity from the original link.
- Update the Link: As a quick fix for internal links (for which the destination page has moved without a redirect), update the link to point to the correct URL.
- Remove the Link: If a page has been permanently deleted and you’ve got no other viable similar page to link out to, it’s best you take the link down altogether. This is a clean way to prevent anyone from hitting a dead end and stops any crawl waste associated with the broken link.
Conclusion: The Importance of a Regular Audit
By understanding that these links waste crawl budgets, lose valuable link equity, and frustrate visitors, you can appreciate the necessity of regular link maintenance. Get in the habit of doing a broken link cleanup once a month. By taking this simple but crucial step, you are not merely tidying up your digital clutter; you’re protecting the health of your website (and hence continuing to hold some SEO value) and providing a better experience for every visitor.