The SEO Guide to Broken Links

What are broken links and how do they affect SEO?

A broken link is a link from one webpage to another webpage that does not exist.

The link itself looks the same on the linking page as any other non-broken link. It is only when the link is followed by a user in a web browser or a crawler such as Googlebot that it becomes apparent it is broken.

A link is broken when the webpage it points to causes the web server to respond with a 404 (page not found) or 410 (page gone) response.

There are two situations in which you need to be concerned about broken links:

• Broken links on your site, whether an internal broken link (pointing to a page on your own site that does not exist) or an external broken link (pointing at a page on a third party external site that does not exist).
• Broken backlinks to your site, links from a third party site pointing to a page on your site that does not exist.

Broken links are bad for SEO for a few reasons, but the main ones are:

• A broken link, especially a broken backlink, is a lost opportunity. A third party site has given you a backlink that you really want to be benefitting from, but if it points at a page that does not exist then you are losing that benefit.
• A broken link from your site (whether an internal or an external backlink) could cause a negative experience for any user who tries to follow the link.

How to find broken links

There are a few options for finding broken links:

• Google Search Console. In the search console for your site in the indexing -> pages section you can find details on any pages that Googlebot has discovered on your site that are serving 404 responses.
• Log file analysis. By analysing your web server logs you can find instances where people have followed a link from another page and have been served a 404 or 410 response including the referring page the link is on, this is perfect for finding backlinks from external websites that are pointing to non-existent pages on your site.
• Site Crawling Software. You can use site crawling software, such as Screaming Frog, to proactively crawl your own website to discover any broken links.

How to fix broken links

To fix broken links you have 3 main options:

• 301 Redirect broken URLs to an existing page on your website. This works great if you have a suitable page for the links to point to. It means you only have to do the one action to create the 301 redirect on the webserver and you don’t have to do and find all instances of the broken link on other webpages to manually fix them. It also passes on any ranking signals from the old page that no longer exists to the new page.
• Manually fix all instances of the broken link. This involves going and finding all instances of pages where there is a link to the non-existent link and changing them to link elsewhere. This fix is best used where you find broken links that point to pages that never existed, say for example where the link was created with a typo in it.
• Recreate the page that was removed. If a page was removed and you can’t find a suitable page to 301 redirect it to then you may want to consider recreating the page, especially if it has a lot of backlinks that you don’t want to lose the benefit of.