You spend money and hours getting people to your website. They click a link to read more, see your services, or check out a product, and they land on a cold, gray “404 Page Not Found” screen. In that moment you have lost something hard to win back: their trust. They assume the rest of your site might be just as unreliable, and a good chunk of them simply leave. Multiply that across every broken link on your site and across the search engine crawlers trying to make sense of your pages, and you start to understand why broken links are one of the most underrated problems in SEO.
The good news is that broken links are also one of the most fixable problems you’ll ever tackle. You don’t need to be a developer, you don’t need expensive software, and you don’t need to rebuild your site. You need a clear process, a free tool or two, and an afternoon. This guide walks you through exactly how to find broken links on your website, understand which ones actually matter, and fix them in a way that protects your search rankings instead of accidentally making things worse.
What Counts as a Broken Link, and Why It Hurts SEO
A broken link is any link that points to a page or resource that no longer exists or can’t be reached. When someone (or a search engine) follows that link, the server returns an error code instead of a working page. The most common is the 404 (“Not Found”), but you’ll also run into 500-level server errors, broken image files, and links that loop endlessly through redirects.
It helps to separate broken links into two categories, because they’re fixed differently:
- Internal broken links point from one page on your site to another page on your site that no longer exists. These are entirely within your control, and they’re the ones that most directly hurt your SEO.
- External broken links (outbound) point from your site to a page on someone else’s website that has since been deleted or moved. You can’t fix the other site, but you can update or remove your link to it.
- Inbound broken links (broken backlinks) are links on other websites that point to a page on your site that no longer exists. These are valuable to recover because they represent link equity you’ve already earned.
So why does any of this matter for rankings? A few reasons. Search engines have a limited “crawl budget” for your site, meaning they only spend so much time and so many requests crawling your pages. Every dead end they hit is wasted effort that could have gone toward discovering and indexing your real content. Broken internal links also break the flow of “link equity,” the authority that passes from page to page through links. When a link points to nothing, that authority leaks away instead of strengthening a live page.
Then there’s the human signal. When visitors hit broken pages, they bounce, they don’t convert, and they spend less time on your site, all behaviors that search engines can interpret as a sign your site isn’t serving people well. For a local Long Island service business competing for “near me” searches, those quality signals genuinely move the needle. Broken links are death by a thousand small cuts, and the cuts compound over time.
Step 1: Crawl Your Site to Find Every Broken Link
You can’t fix what you can’t see, so the first job is a full inventory. The most reliable way to find broken links across an entire site is to crawl it the way a search engine does, following every link and recording the response code each one returns.
Free and low-cost tools that get the job done
- Google Search Console is free and should be your starting point. The Pages report under “Indexing” flags URLs returning 404 and server errors that Google has actually encountered. Because it’s Google’s own data, it tells you which broken links the search engine is genuinely tripping over.
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider crawls your site like a search bot and lists every link with its status code. The free version handles up to 500 URLs, which covers most small business sites. Sort by status code and look for everything in the 4xx and 5xx ranges.
- Ahrefs, Semrush, and similar platforms include site audit features that flag broken internal and external links automatically and re-check them on a schedule. If you already pay for one, use it.
- Browser extensions like a simple “check my links” tool let you scan a single page instantly, which is handy for spot-checking an important landing page or a blog post.
What to actually look for in the results
When the crawl finishes, you’re hunting for specific status codes. A 404 means the page wasn’t found. A 500, 502, or 503 means a server error, which can be temporary but is worth investigating. A 403 means access is forbidden, often a configuration issue. You may also see long redirect chains (301 to 301 to 301) and redirect loops, both of which behave like broken links to a crawler even though they technically resolve.
Most tools will also tell you the source page, meaning the page that contains the broken link. That “where is this link coming from” column is the single most useful piece of information you’ll get, because it tells you exactly where to go to make the fix.
Step 2: Triage by Priority Instead of Fixing Randomly
Here’s where a lot of well-meaning business owners go wrong. They export a list of 300 broken links and try to fix them top to bottom, burning out before they reach the ones that matter. Don’t do that. Sort your list by impact first.
Prioritize in roughly this order:
- Broken links on high-traffic pages. A dead link on your homepage, main service page, or most-visited blog post affects the most people and the most crawl activity. Fix these today.
- Broken internal links pointing to former money pages. If an old service page or product page used to rank and earn leads, and links to it are now broken, that’s lost revenue, not just a technical nuisance.
- Broken pages with inbound backlinks. If another website links to a page on your site that now 404s, you’re throwing away authority you earned. These deserve a proper redirect.
- Broken outbound links. Lower priority for SEO, but still a credibility issue. Clean them up in a batch.
This triage mindset is exactly how a good professional SEO process works: not heroic effort on everything, but deliberate effort on the things that change outcomes. If you only have an hour, the top two categories will give you the vast majority of the benefit.
Step 3: Fix Internal Broken Links the Right Way
Internal broken links are the easiest to fix because everything is under your roof. For each one, you have a few options, and choosing the right one matters.
Option A: Update the link to the correct URL
This is the cleanest fix. If a page simply moved (for example, the URL slug changed during a redesign), find the new, correct URL and update the link in your content to point to it. Don’t rely on a redirect to paper over a wrong link inside your own site. If you control both the link and the destination, point the link straight at the live page. Redirects add a small delay and a little crawl overhead, so direct links are always preferable internally.
Option B: Restore or rebuild the missing page
Sometimes the page should never have disappeared. Maybe it was deleted by accident during a migration, or a service you still offer lost its page. If the destination has real value and people are looking for it, the best fix may be to bring the page back, ideally at its original URL so existing links work again.
Option C: Redirect the old URL to the best alternative
If the page is genuinely gone for good and won’t return, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the most relevant live page. A 301 is a “permanent” redirect, and it passes most of the page’s accumulated authority to the new destination. The key word is relevant: redirect a deleted plumbing-service page to your current plumbing page, not to your homepage. Search engines treat irrelevant redirects to the homepage as “soft 404s” and largely ignore the authority transfer. Match like with like.
Option D: Remove the link entirely
If there’s no good replacement and no reason to keep the link, simply delete it from your content. A removed link is better than a broken one. Just be sure to also fix or remove the underlying page reference so it doesn’t reappear.
Step 4: Handle Broken Backlinks and Outbound Links
Broken backlinks (links from other sites pointing to dead pages on yours) are quietly valuable. Someone went to the trouble of linking to you, and that link still exists on their page, but it now lands on an error. You don’t want to waste that.
To recover them, identify which of your URLs have inbound links using Search Console’s Links report or a backlink tool, cross-reference that list against your broken-page list, and set up a 301 redirect from each broken-but-linked URL to the most relevant live page. You instantly recapture authority that was leaking into the void, often the single highest-ROI move in this entire process.
For broken outbound links, your choices are simpler: update the link to the resource’s new location if it moved, swap it for a comparable working resource, or remove it. Make a habit of re-checking outbound links periodically, since the pages you link to are outside your control and can disappear at any time.
Step 5: Don’t Forget the AI Search Angle
There’s a newer reason to care about broken links that didn’t exist a few years ago. AI search tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity increasingly answer questions by reading and citing web pages. When these systems crawl your site to understand what you offer and decide whether to cite you, broken links and dead ends make your site harder to parse and less trustworthy as a source.
A clean, well-linked site with no broken paths is easier for both traditional crawlers and AI systems to navigate and understand. If getting cited by AI assistants is part of your strategy, technical hygiene like fixing broken links is part of the foundation. This overlaps heavily with the work we do in AI SEO and visibility services, where the goal is making sure your business is the answer these tools surface. The same crawlability that helps Google helps the AI engines, and broken links undermine both at once.
Step 6: Prevent Broken Links From Coming Back
Fixing broken links once feels great. Fixing the same ones again in six months does not. The real win is building habits and systems that keep them from accumulating in the first place.
- Set up a redirect plan before any site redesign or migration. The number one cause of mass broken links is a website rebuild where URLs change and nobody maps the old ones to the new ones. Map every important old URL to its new home before launch.
- Schedule a recurring crawl. Run a site audit monthly or quarterly so problems get caught while they’re small. Search Console will also email you when it detects spikes in errors.
- Be careful when deleting content. Before you delete a page, check whether anything links to it and whether it has backlinks. If it does, set up the redirect at the same time you remove the page.
- Standardize your URLs. Pick a structure and stick with it. Inconsistent trailing slashes, mixed http/https, and www vs. non-www can all generate avoidable redirect issues.
- Keep your platform and plugins updated. On platforms like WordPress, outdated or conflicting plugins can rewrite or break URLs. Solid hosting and maintenance reduces the technical surprises that create broken links in the first place.
A Realistic Weekend Plan
If you want to actually do this rather than just read about it, here’s a sequence that fits in a couple of focused sessions. Start by verifying your site is connected to Google Search Console and reviewing the Pages report for 404s and server errors. Next, run a full crawl with Screaming Frog or your audit tool of choice and export everything returning 4xx and 5xx codes. Sort that export by traffic and importance so you tackle the biggest wins first.
Then work through your prioritized list: update internal links to correct URLs, set up 301 redirects for permanently removed pages that have traffic or backlinks, and delete links that have no good replacement. Finally, re-crawl to confirm the errors are gone, and put a recurring audit on your calendar so this stays a tune-up rather than a rescue. Most small business sites can knock out the meaningful work in a few hours once the inventory is in hand.
Broken links are a small problem that quietly creates big ones: lost trust, wasted crawl budget, leaked authority, and missed conversions. Fixing them is one of the highest-leverage technical improvements you can make, and unlike many SEO tasks, the results are concrete and verifiable. If you’d rather hand the whole thing off, or you want a partner to keep your site clean while you focus on running your business, the team at MJW Media can audit your site, fix what’s broken, and build the safeguards that keep it that way. Reach out for a website and SEO health check, and let’s turn those dead ends into a site that earns trust from visitors and search engines alike.
Do broken links really hurt my Google rankings?
Yes, though usually indirectly. Broken links waste crawl budget, leak link equity from your pages, and create poor user experiences that increase bounce rates. None of these alone tanks your rankings, but together they signal a lower-quality site. Internal broken links pointing to pages that used to rank can directly cost you visibility and traffic.
What’s the difference between a 404 error and a redirect?
A 404 means the page wasn’t found and the visitor hits a dead end. A 301 redirect automatically sends both visitors and search engines from an old URL to a new, working one and passes along most of the page’s authority. When you permanently remove a page that has traffic or backlinks, a 301 redirect to a relevant live page is almost always better than leaving a 404.
How often should I check my website for broken links?
For most small business sites, a monthly or quarterly crawl is plenty to catch problems while they’re small. Always run a thorough check before and after any site redesign, migration, or major content cleanup, since those are the events most likely to create broken links in bulk. Google Search Console will also alert you to spikes in errors between scheduled audits.
Should I redirect all my broken pages to my homepage?
No. Redirecting unrelated pages to your homepage is treated by search engines as a soft 404, which means little to no authority transfers and the redirect is largely ignored. Always redirect a removed page to the most relevant live page, matching the topic as closely as possible. A deleted service page should point to your current service page, not the homepage.
Can I fix broken links myself or do I need a developer?
Most broken link fixes don’t require a developer. Updating links in your content, removing dead links, and setting up basic 301 redirects can usually be done through your CMS or a redirect plugin. You may want professional help for large-scale redirect mapping during a migration, recurring technical audits, or recovering backlinks at scale, where a structured process protects your rankings.
