Broken Link
A broken link is a hyperlink that leads to a page that no longer works, usually showing a 404 error. Broken backlinks pass little or no value until the page is fixed or redirected.
Impact of Broken Links on SEO
Broken links are a normal part of the web. Pages get deleted, businesses close, sites change their URL structure during redesigns and domains expire. A 2024 Pew Research Center study found that 38% of web pages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible a decade later. Every one of those dead pages leaves broken links behind.
The SEO impact depends on which direction the link points.
Broken links on your own site hurt user experience first. A visitor who clicks a link and hits a 404 error page is more likely to leave. Search engines also waste crawl activity on dead URLs, which matters most on large sites where Google may not crawl every page often. A handful of broken outbound links will not sink a site, but pages full of them look neglected. Readers notice too. A guide whose sources no longer load is harder to trust, even if its own advice is still accurate.
Broken backlinks pointing to your site carry a bigger cost. When another website links to a page of yours that no longer exists, the link lands on a 404 and the link equity it once passed is mostly lost. If a popular guide that earned fifty backlinks is deleted during a redesign, all fifty links stop helping your site. This lost link value is one of the most common hidden causes of ranking drops after a site migration.
Search engines do not penalize a site for having some broken links. The problem is waste: lost visitors, lost crawl activity and lost authority that you already earned.
Finding Broken Links
Finding broken links means checking in two directions.
For links on your own site, a crawler is the standard tool. Screaming Frog, Sitebulb and the site audit features in Ahrefs and Semrush crawl your pages and report every link that returns an error, along with the page where each broken link appears. A comparison like Screaming Frog vs Ahrefs can help you choose the right crawler for your site size. Run a crawl after any redesign, migration or content cleanup.
For broken backlinks pointing to your site, use a backlink tool. Ahrefs has a report that lists pages on your site returning 404 errors while still receiving external links, sorted by the number of referring domains. Semrush and Moz offer similar data. These reports show exactly which dead pages are wasting the most link value.
Google Search Console helps too. Its Pages report lists URLs that return 404 errors, and its Links report shows which pages receive external links. Comparing the two shows dead pages that still attract links. The guide to checking backlinks in Google Search Console explains where to find this data.
Make broken link checks a routine. A monthly crawl for internal problems and a quarterly review of broken backlinks catch most issues before they cost much.
Fixing or Redirecting
The right fix depends on what happened to the page.
If the page was deleted by mistake, restore it. If it moved to a new URL, add a 301 redirect from the old address to the new one. A 301 tells search engines the move is permanent and passes most of the old page’s value to the new location.
If the content no longer exists, redirect the dead URL to the most relevant live page, such as an updated guide on the same topic or the parent category. Avoid redirecting every dead page to the homepage. Google may treat irrelevant redirects like that as soft 404 errors, which pass little value.
If no relevant page exists and the old page had strong backlinks, consider recreating the content. A short, updated version of a popular resource can recover links that would otherwise be lost.
For broken links on your own pages, update or remove them. Point internal links to the correct URL instead of relying on a redirect chain, and replace dead outbound links with working sources. After adding redirects, recheck the old URLs with a crawler to confirm each one returns a single 301 hop to a working page.
This whole process is a core part of link reclamation: recovering value from links you already earned. It is often the fastest win available, since no outreach is needed to fix links on your own site.
Using Broken Links for Outreach
Broken links on other websites are an opportunity. When a site links to a dead page, its owner has a problem they may not know about. Pointing it out, and offering your own relevant page as a replacement, is the basis of broken link building.
The process starts with finding dead pages in your niche that used to attract links, such as discontinued tools, closed businesses or deleted guides. Backlink tools can show which sites still link to each dead page. Resource pages are especially good targets, since their owners care about keeping their lists useful, and resource page link building often overlaps with broken link outreach.
Before contacting anyone, make sure your replacement page covers the same topic as well as or better than the original. Use the Wayback Machine to see what the dead page offered.
Keep the outreach short and specific. Name the page, point to the exact broken link and suggest your replacement in one or two sentences. Webmasters respond better when the email reads as a helpful tip than as a link request.
Broken links cost visitors, crawl activity and authority, but they are also one of the easiest problems in SEO to fix. Check your site and your backlinks regularly, redirect dead pages to relevant replacements, and use dead links on other sites as a reason to start a helpful conversation.