Broken Link
A broken link is a hyperlink that points to a page or resource that no longer exists or cannot be reached. Clicking it returns an error, most often a 404 Not Found. Broken links frustrate visitors, waste crawl budget, and signal poor maintenance to search engines.
Broken links are also called dead links. When links decay across the web over time, the phenomenon is known as link rot.
Why Broken Links Matter
Broken links hurt user experience first. A visitor who clicks a link expecting content and lands on an error page often leaves. That raises bounce rate and lowers trust in your site.
Search engines treat broken links as a quality signal. Googlebot wastes crawl budget following links that lead nowhere, which is a real cost on large sites. Google’s John Mueller has said that 404 errors are a normal part of the web and do not directly penalize rankings. The damage comes indirectly, through poor navigation, lost link equity, and a worse experience for people who never convert.
Broken outbound links also weaken your content’s credibility. A page citing dead sources looks outdated and unreliable.
Types of Broken Links
Broken links fall into three categories based on direction:
- Internal broken links. Links between pages on your own site that no longer resolve. Usually caused by deleting a page or changing its URL slug without a redirect.
- External (outbound) broken links. Links from your pages to other websites that have gone offline, moved, or restructured. You do not control the destination, so these break without warning.
- Broken backlinks (inbound). Links from other sites pointing to pages on yours that now return an error. These waste referral traffic and lost ranking signals you already earned.
What Causes Broken Links
Broken links have a handful of common causes:
- A page is deleted and no redirect is put in place.
- A URL slug or folder structure changes during a redesign or migration.
- A typo appears in the href, such as a missing letter or an extra slash.
- An external domain expires or the destination site removes the content.
- HTTPS migration leaves old HTTP links pointing to non-canonical URLs.
- A CMS export or import strips or mangles the original URLs.
Most broken links return a 404 Not Found status. Some return 410 Gone when content is intentionally removed, or a 5xx code when the destination server fails.
How to Find Broken Links
Use a dedicated tool rather than checking links by hand. Options include:
- Google Search Console. The Pages report flags URLs returning 404 and other errors that Google has crawled.
- Site crawlers. Screaming Frog, Ahrefs Site Audit, and Semrush crawl every link and list the ones that fail.
- Link checkers. W3C Link Checker and Dr. Link Check scan a page or site for dead links.
To confirm a single URL is valid before you publish it, run it through a URL validator to catch formatting errors and unreachable destinations early.
How to Fix Broken Links
The right fix depends on why the link broke:
- Update the URL. If the page moved, replace the old href with the current address.
- Restore the page. If content was removed by mistake, republish it at the original URL.
- Add a redirect. If a page is gone for good but had traffic or backlinks, use a 301 redirect to send visitors and ranking signals to the closest relevant page.
- Remove the link. If no suitable replacement exists, delete the hyperlink so readers are not sent to a dead end.
Never redirect every broken URL to your homepage. Google treats irrelevant redirects as soft 404s, and visitors find them confusing.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a broken link?
A broken link is a hyperlink that leads to a page or file that no longer exists or cannot be loaded. Clicking it returns an error, usually a 404 Not Found. Broken links are also called dead links.
What causes a broken link?
The most common cause is a page being deleted or moved without a redirect. Typos in the URL, expired domains, changed slugs during a site migration, and external sites removing content also create broken links.
Do broken links hurt SEO?
Broken links do not directly trigger a ranking penalty, but they harm SEO indirectly. They waste crawl budget, worsen user experience, raise bounce rate, and cause you to lose the ranking signals from any backlinks pointing to the dead page.
How do I check for broken links?
Use a broken link checker such as Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, or Ahrefs Site Audit. These tools crawl your pages and list every link that returns an error so you can fix or redirect it.
What is the difference between a broken link and a redirect?
A broken link returns an error because the destination is gone. A redirect points an old URL to a working page, so visitors reach content instead of an error. Adding a broken link redirect with a 301 is the standard way to fix a dead URL that still has value.
Run every important URL through a free URL validator before you publish to catch broken links before your readers do.