How to Find and Fix Broken Links

A broken link is any link that no longer leads anywhere useful — the target returns a 404, the domain is gone, or the server errors out. Every site accumulates them: pages get renamed, external sites shut down, URLs get typo'd. Left alone, they waste crawl budget, leak link equity, and hand visitors a dead end at the exact moment they were interested. Here is how to find them and what to do with each one.

Why broken links matter for SEO

• Crawl budget — search engine bots follow your links; every dead end is a wasted crawl that could have gone to a real page.
• Link equity — internal links pass authority between your pages. A link to a 404 passes it into a void.
• User signals — visitors who hit a 404 tend to leave. High abandonment on broken paths is a quality signal you don't want.
• Trust — a page full of dead references reads as unmaintained, to users and to raters alike.

How to find broken links

Start with your most important pages — the homepage, top landing pages, and anything that earns links or traffic. Run each through the broken link checker: it fetches the page, follows every link it finds, and lists the broken ones first with their status codes. For whole-site coverage, work through your sitemap page by page (if you don't have one, the XML sitemap generator will build it) and check Google Search Console → Indexing → Pages, which reports 404s Google itself has hit.

Reading the status codes

• 404 / 410 — the page doesn't exist (410 means "gone on purpose"). These are the classic broken links.
• 5xx — the target server is failing. Sometimes temporary; re-check before acting.
• Timeouts / DNS errors — the whole host is unreachable, often a dead domain.
• 3xx — a redirect, not broken, but worth updating the link to the final URL to skip the hop. Inspect any redirect chain with the HTTP headers checker.

Fix, redirect, or remove?

Each broken link gets one of three treatments:

• Fix the link — if the target still exists at a new URL (or the link was a typo), update the href. Best outcome, always prefer it.
• Redirect the target — if the broken URL is on your site and other sites or bookmarks point at it, set up a 301 permanent redirect to the closest live equivalent. That recovers the traffic and most of the link equity. The redirect generator writes the server config for you. Don't redirect everything to the homepage — irrelevant redirects are treated as soft 404s.
• Remove the link — if the external target is gone for good with no replacement, unlink the text (or link to an archived copy on the Wayback Machine).

Keeping them from coming back

• Whenever you rename, move or delete a page, add a 301 redirect from the old URL in the same change.
• Prefer linking to stable, root-level resources over deep URLs that sites love to reorganize.
• Re-check your key pages on a schedule — quarterly is plenty for most sites — and after any restructure or migration.
• Keep a custom 404 page with search and links to popular pages, so the visitors you miss still have somewhere to go.

Broken-link cleanup is one of the rare SEO tasks that is fully within your control, costs nothing, and improves users' experience at the same time. A short session with the checker once a quarter keeps it that way.