Why they matter
Visitors who hit a dead end leave. Search engines that follow broken links waste crawl time on them, and any ranking value the link carried is lost. Broken links on a site also signal that it is not maintained.
Where they come from
Pages renamed without a redirect, products or posts deleted, typos in links, and external sites that disappear. Link rot is normal over time: a share of the external links on any older page stops working each year.
Fixing them
For your own pages, add a 301 redirect from the old address to the closest live page whenever you move or delete something. For links on your pages that point elsewhere, update or remove them. Check a site regularly, especially after a redesign or migration.
Finding them
Crawl your site with a link checker to find links that return errors, and check Google Search Console's pages report for URLs that return 404. For pages you removed on purpose, a 404 or 410 is correct; the problem is links that still point to them. Fix the links, or redirect the old address if it still gets visits.
Example
A blog renames a post's URL without a redirect; the old address, linked from three other sites, returns 404 until a 301 redirect sends it to the new one.
Questions people ask
- Do broken links hurt SEO?
- A few do little direct harm, but they waste the value of links pointing to lost pages and give visitors a dead end. Redirect your own moved pages.
- Should every 404 be redirected?
- No. Redirect old pages that have links or visitors to the closest equivalent. Pages with no replacement can return 404; redirecting everything to the homepage confuses visitors and search engines.
Related terms
- 301 redirectA 301 redirect is an HTTP response that tells browsers and search engines a page has moved permanently to a new URL. Search engines move the old URL's signals to the new one.
- Redirect chainA redirect chain is when a URL redirects to another URL that redirects again, so a visitor or crawler passes through two or more hops before reaching the final page.
- Internal linkAn internal link is a link from one page of a website to another page of the same website. Internal links help visitors move around and help search engines find pages and understand which ones matter.
- Crawl budgetCrawl budget is the number of URLs a search engine is willing and able to fetch from your site in a given time. It matters most for large sites and sites with many low value URLs.