
What Are Broken Links
A broken link is a web page that a user is unable to find or access for a variety of reasons. When a user attempts to visit a broken link, web servers often return an error message. Broken links are also commonly referred to as broken links or link rot.
For example, look at Asana’s 404 error page. A visitor will receive this notice if they click on a broken link on Asana’s website or on an external website that uses a broken link to send readers to Asana.
Illustration of Broken Link Error Codes
Here are some instances of codes for errors that a web server might display for a broken link:
- 404 Page Not Found: The website or resource does not exist on the server.
- A 400 Bad Request indicates that the host server is unable to comprehend the URL on your page.
- Inappropriate Host Name: The server with the given name does not exist or is unavailable.
- Malformed URL: missing brackets, additional slashes, incorrect protocol, etc.
- The server answer violates the HTTP specification, resulting in an invalid HTTP response code.
- The host server delivers “empty” responses, meaning there is no content or response code.
- HTTP queries are periodically timed out during link checks.
- Reset: the host server disconnects. It’s either misconfigured or very busy.
Common Reasons Why Links Break
- Misspelled or mistyped
- Your site’s URL structure (permalinks) has changed without a redirect, resulting in a 404 error.
- The external site has ceased to be available, down, or has been permanently relocated.
- Links to moved or deleted information, such as PDFs, Google Docs, and videos.
Why Broken Links Hurt Your Website
- Broken links that leave and backlinks are completely natural for any website. The World Wide Web is dynamic: pages and entire websites are continuously being erased.
- Broken backlinks are also a missed opportunity. Backlinks that point to 404 pages on your site could instead convey value and authority (link equity) to live appropriate web pages on your site, enhancing their chances of ranking.
Why Broken Links Are Bad for SEO

Google is increasingly placing a great importance on user experience. When you think about it, a good user experience indicates that you are optimizing your site efficiently, repairing any broken links, and providing regular and compelling content. In turn, Google will prefer your website. After all, broken links indicate that Google will be unable to crawl (index) your site, which affects the bounce rate—this is a Google ranking criteria.
How to Find Broken Links on Your Website
Before you can fix broken links, you must first find them (if your site has any).
Fortunately, you don’t have to personally click on each every link on your domain to determine whether it’s broken or not. There are numerous tools available to help you assess the present health of your internal, external, and inbound relationships.
First and foremost, I would recommend premium tools like Semrush’s Site Audit or Backlink Audit. You can also utilize Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider, SEO Power Suite’s Link Assistant, and the Broken Link Checker.
On a budget? Google Analytics allows you to discover broken links for free.
How to discover broken links with Google Search Console
You may also use Google Search Console to find broken links. Best of all, Google Search Console (GSC) is free to use. Once authenticated into GSC, choose or add the property you want to check for broken links. Use Semrush to find broken internal and external links.
While Google Analytics 4 provides some information about broken links, it is not as detailed as Semrush’s Site Audit tool. To utilize Site Audit, add the website you wish to evaluate to Semrush as a new project. Once you’ve completed the site audit, navigate to the “Issues” tab. Rather than browsing through all issues, simply search for “broke.”
How to Locate Broken Backlinks?
Broken backlinks, also known as incoming links from other domains, arise when another site connects with one of your pages that is either broken or no longer exists.
Semrush’s Backlink Audit tool can help you detect broken backlinks.
After you launch a link audit, the main dashboard will provide you an overview of how many damaged backlinks you have.
Transferring Links
One of the most effective strategies to repair broken internal links while maintaining SEO benefits is to use 301 redirects. A 301 redirect informs visitors and search engines that a page has been permanently moved to a new destination. Importantly, this form of redirect still transfers PageRank to the redirected website.
If a page on your site has been permanently relocated or destroyed, use 301 redirects; otherwise, redirect readers to a similar page.
For example, you’ve consolidated the About Us and Meet the Team pages into a single URL.
All prior links to these individual pages can be moved to the new merged webpage, as long as the user sees the intended content when they click the link.
You ought not to 301 redirect to an irrelevant or related page because it can harm your user experience and future site rankings.
Content management systems, such as WordPress, provide redirection widgets to help simplify and automate the process.
Repairing or replacing links
A 301 redirect may be a more labor-intensive fix than necessary, particularly if the broken link is caused by a simple error, rendering a redirect ineffective.
In this situation, having identified broken links on your site using one of the previous tools or approaches and determined the anchor point, just replace the old URL with the new or updated URL. Test the new link to check that it takes users to the correct site.
If the linked content is out of current, irrelevant, or no longer exists, it is usually better to either remove the link entirely or change it with a more relevant resource.
Check your site for links to obsolete content and see if there is a current version or a more recent resource available. Replace the previous connection with the new resource.
If no suitable counterpart exists, suggest linking to a reliable external site that adds value to your material. If neither of these alternatives are available, delete the link to ensure content integrity.
How to Fix Broken External Links
Now, if you have a faulty outside link or links that go nowhere, they offer no value to your webpage’s content. You can use a tool to verify the external links’ accuracy. If you find broken external links, your best bet is to replace them with active links. Alternatively, you can remove the damaged external connections altogether.
The initial stage should be to examine the external URL for typos. Any additional digit, dash, or letter can take the user to a 404 page. If the targeted page is still available, you should replicate the URL again to ensure accuracy. However, if the linked page is no longer available, the best alternative is to delete the external link. You can also search for a different source to substitute the external link.
Utilize Broken Link Building
The final stage is to select for broken link building. You may have heard of broken link construction before, which is an excellent way for repairing broken links. The trick is to take advantage of your competitors’ broken links. In exchange for high-quality backlinks, you will provide a useful website or content to link to.
Final Thoughts
Now that you be able to fix broken links, you may have realized how important it is to do site audits on a regular basis in order to properly monitor outside, in order internal, and backlinks.
We already mentioned the enormous harm that broken links can cause to your website’s SEO. You will lose Google ranking and user trust in your website. They will abandon your website and look for the information they need elsewhere. Nonetheless, you can contact a reputable link-building business, such as Globex Outreach, to have an expert SEO team execute the link audits for you.