Broken links are the potholes of a website — individually minor, collectively a signal that no one's maintaining the place. They waste crawl budget, frustrate users, and leak the value of pages that other sites once linked to. Here's how to find and fix them without overthinking it.
Do broken links hurt SEO?
A few 404s are normal and won't tank your rankings — Google expects pages to disappear over time. The real costs are indirect: broken internal links waste crawl budget and strand link equity, broken links to you from other sites lose you that authority, and a page full of dead links is a poor user experience that raises bounce. It's a maintenance issue worth staying on top of, not a penalty to fear.
404 vs soft 404 vs 410
Get the status codes right:
- 404 Not Found — the page doesn't exist. Correct for genuinely removed content.
- Soft 404 — a page that says "not found" but returns a
200 OK. This confuses Google; make sure missing pages return a real 404. - 410 Gone — like 404 but explicitly permanent; Google drops it from the index slightly faster. Use it when you know content is gone for good.
Finding broken links
Check both directions. For internal and outbound broken links, crawl your own site. For broken links pointing at you (from external sites hitting dead URLs), use Search Console's coverage and 404 reports. The dead URLs with external links are your highest-value fixes.
Fixing internal links
For a broken internal link, the fix is simple: update the link to the correct URL, or remove it. Don't rely on a catch-all redirect to paper over broken internal links — fix the link at the source so you're not silently pointing users and crawlers through unnecessary hops.
Reclaiming inbound links
When an external site links to a page you've moved or deleted, 301-redirect the old URL to the best equivalent page. That recovers the link equity and sends the visitor somewhere useful instead of a dead end. It's one of the highest-ROI SEO tasks there is — you're recovering authority you already earned.
Checking link status
You can't see a link's status by looking at it — you have to check the response. SEO Inspector extracts every link on the current page and flags the ones returning 4xx errors or redirects, so broken links surface page by page instead of waiting for a user to hit them.
