Broken Links Explained: What They Are and How to Fix Them

Broken links are hyperlinks that no longer reach their intended destination, leading users to error pages like "404 Not Found." These issues affect most websites regularly but are completely fixable with proper detection and repair strategies.

What Are Broken Links: Definition and Types

Let's break down what broken links are, why they happen, and how to recognize different types you'll encounter.

A broken link (also called a dead link or broken hyperlink) is a hyperlink that points to content that cannot be accessed. When someone clicks a broken link, they encounter an error page instead of reaching their intended destination, most commonly seeing a "404 error" message that indicates the server couldn't find the requested page.

According to the Mozilla Developer Network, the 404 Not Found status code is just one type of error that creates broken links. You'll also encounter 410 Gone errors when content has been permanently removed, and various server errors that prevent access to otherwise functional pages.

Internal vs External Broken Links

Understanding the difference between internal and external broken links helps you prioritize fixes and choose the right repair strategies.

Internal broken links point to missing pages on your own website. These happen when you delete or move pages but forget to update the links pointing to them. You have complete control over fixing internal broken links since they involve content you manage.

External broken links target unavailable pages on other websites. These occur when external sites change their structure, delete content, or go offline entirely. While you can't control external sites, you can update your links to point elsewhere or remove them.

Common Error Types That Create Broken Links

Different HTTP status codes indicate different types of broken links:

• 404 Not Found: The most common broken link error, indicating the requested page doesn't exist at that location

• 410 Gone: Signals that content was permanently removed and won't return

• 403 Forbidden: The page exists but access is restricted

• 500 Internal Server Error: Server problems prevent the page from loading properly

The Link Rot Phenomenon

Link rot describes how websites naturally accumulate broken links over time as their structure and content evolves. Sites reorganize pages, companies rebrand with new domains, and content gets archived or deleted without updating the links that reference it.

Consider an online store that discontinues a product line. The individual product pages get deleted to clean up inventory, but category pages, blog posts about the products, and promotional banners still contain links to those removed pages. Customers clicking these internal broken links see 404 errors instead of product information, creating frustration and potentially losing sales.

As part of comprehensive website testing practices, regular broken link detection helps prevent these user experience disruptions from accumulating over time.

Why Broken Links Matter for SEO, UX, and Business Impact

You're not alone if you've discovered broken links across your website. Even well-maintained sites develop dead links over time, and the consequences extend far beyond frustrated clicks.

SEO Performance Takes a Hit

Search engines like Google view excessive broken links as a signal of poor site maintenance. When search engine bots encounter broken internal links, they waste valuable crawl budget on dead ends, meaning fewer resources remain for indexing your important pages.

Link equity gets lost when internal links break. The SEO value that should flow between your pages dissipates at broken connection points, weakening your overall domain authority.

User Experience Suffers Immediately

Broken links interrupt user journeys at critical moments. Visitors lose trust in your website's reliability when they encounter error pages instead of expected content.

Consider this common scenario: A blog migrates to a new content management system. Internal links to related articles break during the transition. Page views drop significantly and average session duration decreases as users can't navigate between topics smoothly.

Business Conversions Drop

Broken links on checkout pages, contact forms, or product pages directly reduce revenue. Users abandon purchase flows when key navigation fails.

External sites linking to your broken pages represent wasted marketing opportunities. Each broken backlink costs you referral traffic and the SEO benefits of those inbound links.

Regular monitoring using website testing tools can detect broken hyperlinks automatically, making maintenance manageable even for large sites.

Causes of Broken Links: Technical and Content Issues

Understanding why broken links happen helps you prevent them in the first place. Most causes fall into predictable categories that you can anticipate and plan around.

Content Deletion Without Proper Planning

Content deletion ranks as the top cause of internal broken links. When you remove pages from your website without setting up redirects, every link pointing to that content instantly breaks.

A redirect tells browsers and search engines that content has moved to a new location. Here's what typically happens: your team removes an outdated product page but forgets about the five blog posts that link to it. Those internal links now lead to 404 errors instead of useful content.

URL Structure Changes During Redesigns

Website redesigns frequently change how URLs are structured. Your old blog might use /blog/2023/article-title/ while the new site uses /insights/article-title/.

Without redirects mapping old URLs to new ones, you'll have broken links throughout your site. Many redesign projects focus on visual changes while overlooking URL preservation, resulting in hundreds of broken links that could have been prevented with proper planning.

Domain Issues Beyond Your Control

External sites go offline, change their domain names, or let domains expire. When a site you link to moves from oldsite.com to newsite.com without redirects, your outbound link breaks.

Example: A company rebrands and changes their domain from oldname.com to newbrand.com without setting up redirects. Every website linking to their old domain now has broken external links, including yours.

Server Problems and Technical Glitches

Server problems create temporary broken links even when content exists. Misconfigurations, hosting issues, or server overload can make functional pages temporarily inaccessible.

The tricky part about server problems is distinguishing temporary issues from permanent ones. A page might return a 500 error today but work fine tomorrow.

Manual Typos and Human Error

Typos in manually created links cause immediate broken links. Common mistakes include misspelled domain names, incorrect file extensions, or wrong folder paths.

These errors happen during content creation when someone types a URL instead of copying it. Even experienced content creators make these mistakes regularly.

To make this easier to apply, here’s a quick reference table that maps each common cause of broken links to a real-world example and the practical fix.

Most broken links come from avoidable causes like content deletion or URL changes and proactive redirect planning solves the majority.

How to Detect Broken Links

Finding broken links across your website can feel like searching for needles in a haystack. The good news is that you don't need to be a technical expert to catch these issues before they hurt your site's performance.

Manual Checking and Browser Tools

The simplest approach is browsing your site regularly and clicking through important links. Your browser's developer tools offer a more systematic manual approach:

1. Open your browser's developer tools (F12 in Chrome or Firefox)

2. Navigate to the Network tab before loading the page

3. Reload the page and watch for failed requests highlighted in red

4. Look for 4XX or 5XX status codes in the Status column

This method works well for diagnosing specific pages when you notice loading issues.

Free Online Link Checkers

Several free tools can scan individual pages for broken hyperlinks. The W3C Link Checker remains one of the most reliable options, validating HTML, CSS, and anchors while respecting robots.txt files.

Other popular single-page checkers include Dead Link Checker and Broken Link Check. These tools focus on one page at a time, which aligns with most no-code link-checking solutions that prioritize simplicity over comprehensive coverage.

Google Search Console Insights

Google Search Console reports crawl errors and broken internal links that Google discovers during its regular crawling. Check the Coverage report under Index for pages that return 4XX errors, and review the Links section for broken internal linking patterns.

The Console excels at showing you broken links from Google's perspective, but it only reports issues that Google has encountered, not necessarily every broken link on your site.

Comprehensive Site Crawling

Full-site analysis tools crawl every accessible page to generate complete broken link reports. Unlike single-page checkers, they show the full scope of linking problems across an entire website.

Within this category, approaches differ:

• SEO platforms are specialized tools that include broken link detection as part of larger technical audits. They highlight link issues in the broader context of SEO health and often include backlink and keyword analysis.

• Dedicated link crawlers focus exclusively on link validation. These single-purpose crawlers (desktop or cloud-based) deliver thorough link analysis across all pages but don’t extend into other areas of testing.

• Sitepager takes this a step further. Instead of running separate single-purpose scans, it uses a URL-based crawl to generate broken link reports alongside visual regression checks, SEO validation, and performance insights in one pass.

Example: A marketing team that regularly sends newsletters with links back to their site received complaints about broken pages. They ran an automated site crawl instead of manually checking each newletter link. The crawl revealed that their recent website restructure had broken dozens of internal links across their blog and resources, issues manual checks never would have caught.

Adding broken link detection to your pre-launch checklist helps catch these issues before they reach users.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of detection methods, showing their strengths and limitations to help you pick the right approach for your website.

How to Fix Broken Links: Complete Repair Strategies

Fixing broken links is often simple. You have several proven strategies at your disposal, and the key is choosing the right approach for each situation while tackling repairs systematically.

Redirect Strategies: 301 vs 302 vs 410

Redirects are your first line of defense against broken links, but choosing the wrong type can actually hurt your SEO efforts.

301 Redirects for Permanent Moves

Use 301 redirects when content has permanently moved to a new location. This redirect type passes most of the original page's SEO value to the destination page, making it ideal for:

• URL structure changes: Moving from /blog/2024/post-title to /blog/post-title

• Content consolidation: Combining multiple similar pages into one comprehensive resource

• Domain migrations: Redirecting old domain pages to new domain equivalents

When consolidating content, use canonical tags carefully to avoid duplicate page issues. Always pair them with proper 301 redirects so outdated URLs don’t remain accessible.

According to Google's official documentation, 301 redirects are the preferred method for permanent content moves because they clearly signal your intent to search engines.

Avoid redirect chains longer than 3–5 hops. They slow page loading and can dilute SEO value. Redirect directly to the final destination whenever possible.

302 Redirects for Temporary Moves

Use 302 redirects sparingly, only when content will return to its original location. Common scenarios include maintenance redirects, A/B testing, or seasonal campaigns.

410 Gone for Permanent Removal

When content is permanently deleted and has no suitable replacement, use a 410 status code instead of leaving users with a generic 404 error. Search engines interpret 410 codes as definitive removal signals.

Updating and Replacing Internal Links

Internal broken links are often the easiest to fix because you have complete control over both the linking page and the destination.

Direct Link Updates

Start with a straightforward approach:

1. Identify the correct current URL for the content you're trying to link to

2. Update the href attribute in your HTML or content management system

3. Test the updated link to confirm it works properly

4. Update your sitemap if the changes affect your site structure

For sites with many internal links, create a spreadsheet mapping old URLs to new ones. This prevents you from making the same corrections multiple times.

Handling External Link Failures

External broken links require a different approach since you can't control the destination site.

Finding Alternative Sources

Replace broken external links with similar content from reliable sources by searching for the same information on authoritative sites in your industry. Check if the original site moved the content to a different URL, or use the Wayback Machine to find archived versions.

Strategic Link Removal

Not every broken external link needs replacement. Remove links that pointed to outdated information, were nice-to-have references rather than essential sources, or led to sites that are no longer trustworthy.

Managing Broken Backlinks Through Outreach

Broken backlinks represent lost SEO value, but you can recover much of it through strategic outreach. Identify high-value referring domains linking to your broken pages, find contact information for webmasters, and craft personalized emails explaining the broken link situation.

Real-world example: A digital marketing agency discovered that their most popular case study page had broken during a site redesign, causing 15 high-authority backlinks to return 404 errors. They implemented a 301 redirect from the old URL to the updated case study page and reached out to the linking sites. Within 30 days, 12 of the 15 sites updated their links, and the redirect captured traffic from the remaining sites.

Integrating repairs into automated testing workflows helps teams catch and fix broken links before they impact users, turning reactive repairs into proactive prevention.

Prevention and Ongoing Monitoring: Long-Term Strategies

Building prevention systems upfront saves you countless hours of reactive scrambling later. Most website teams discover broken links the hard way through angry user reports or plummeting search rankings.

Establish Content Workflow Standards

Your content team needs clear procedures for URL changes. Without these standards, every page edit becomes a potential broken link disaster.

Create redirect planning workflows:

• Document existing internal links before changing or moving any page

• Set up 301 redirects from old URLs to new destinations

• Test redirect chains to avoid multiple hops that slow page loading.

• Update internal navigation menus and footer links immediately after URL changes

Implement pre-publishing checks:

• Verify all internal links point to existing pages

• Test external links for accessibility and relevance

• Use staging environments to test link functionality before going live

Set Up Regular Monitoring Schedules

Monthly broken link scans catch issues before they multiply across your site. Quarterly comprehensive audits ensure nothing slips through the cracks during busy periods.

Most broken link tools require you to run separate manual checks each time. With Sitepager, you can run a single crawl that checks links, visual consistency, SEO, and performance together. The scans are on-demand, but you still get a complete picture of site health without switching between tools.

Example: A SaaS marketing team set up a simple routine: they scanned their site monthly, checked internal links in staging before publishing, and re-ran scans after updating product pages. When the company rebranded, this process caught and fixed more than 200 potential broken links before they went live.

Develop Link Validation Practices

Testing links before publishing content prevents most broken link issues from reaching your live site.

• Pre-publication validation: Click every internal link to verify destinations load correctly, test external links open properly, and verify file downloads are accessible

• Post-publication verification: Spot-check published content within 24 hours of going live and monitor server logs for 404 errors

Train Your Team on Link Impact

Content creators often don't realize how URL changes ripple through existing content. Basic training prevents unintentional broken links from common editing tasks.

Cover essential knowledge like how changing page URLs affects existing internal links, when to use 301 redirects versus updating links directly, and why external links need periodic review and updates.

Prevention systems require upfront setup time, but they eliminate the stress of discovering widespread broken links during critical business periods.

FAQs About Broken Links

What's the difference between 404 errors and broken links?

Broken links cause 404 errors when clicked. The 404 error is the result that users see when a broken link fails to load its intended destination.

How often should I check for broken links?

Check for broken links monthly for most websites, or weekly for sites with frequent content updates or e-commerce catalogs.

Do broken links hurt search engine rankings?

Excessive broken links can negatively impact rankings by signaling poor site maintenance, though occasional broken links won't cause major ranking drops.

What is link rot and how is it different from broken links?

Link rot describes the gradual process of links breaking over time. Broken links are the end result of link rot occurring.

Can broken external links hurt my site's SEO?

External broken links generally won't damage your rankings directly. However, they create poor user experience and waste visitors' time.

What tools detect broken links automatically?

The W3C Link Checker scans single pages for broken links. Crawl-based tools scan entire sites. Sitepager combines broken link detection with visual, SEO, and performance checks in one scan.

Are broken internal links worse than broken external links?

Broken internal links typically cause more SEO damage because they waste crawl budget and signal poor site maintenance directly under your control.