What is Broken link?

A broken link (or dead link) is a hyperlink whose destination no longer delivers the page it promised. Instead of a 200 OK, the click ends in a HTTP 404 Not Found Not Found, a HTTP 410 Gone Gone, a 5xx server error, a timeout, or a domain that no longer resolves at all.

Links break for ordinary reasons: a page is deleted or its slug changes without a redirect, a site migrates, an external site you cited shuts down, or someone simply mistypes a URL in the editor.

Internal vs external broken links

The two kinds hurt in different ways, so treat them separately.

• Internal broken links point to your own pages. They are the more serious problem: they send crawlers into dead ends, stop link value from flowing to the pages that need it and break the paths visitors use to explore your site. Your internal linking structure is only as strong as its working links.
• External broken links point to other sites. They don’t harm your rankings directly, but a page full of dead citations looks neglected, which undermines trust in the content — for readers and for anyone judging whether your page is a reliable source.

What Google actually says

A 404 on a URL that genuinely no longer exists is normal and does not penalize the rest of your site. Google’s documentation on HTTP errors explains that 4xx URLs are eventually dropped from the index and crawled less often. The SEO damage comes from the side effects: a once-valuable page that disappeared along with all the backlinks pointing to it, and internal links that keep wasting requests on dead URLs.

Example and fix

Say you renamed a guide from /blog/seo-tips to /blog/seo-checklist, and twelve older posts still link to the old address:

<!-- Broken: the old slug now returns 404 -->
<a href="/blog/seo-tips">our SEO checklist</a>

<!-- Fixed: link straight to the live URL -->
<a href="/blog/seo-checklist">our SEO checklist</a>

Do two things. First, add a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one so backlinks and bookmarks still work. Second, update the twelve internal links to the new URL directly, so your own pages don’t depend on the redirect.

Mistakes to avoid

• Redirecting every 404 to the home page. Google typically treats an irrelevant redirect like this as a soft 404, so you gain nothing and confuse visitors. Redirect only to a genuinely equivalent page; otherwise let the URL return 404 or 410.
• Serving error pages with a 200 status. A “page not found” message delivered with 200 OK is a soft 404 and can keep junk URLs in the index.
• Checking once and never again. External sites change constantly; links that worked at publication decay over the years.

How to check

Run any page through the Broken Link Checker. It tests up to 200 internal and external links on the page for 404, 410, 5xx, DNS errors and redirects, and shows the anchor text of each broken one so you can find it in your editor quickly. For a step-by-step cleanup workflow, read How to Find and Fix Broken Links on Your Website.

Frequently asked questions