How to Find and Fix Broken Links on Your Website
Broken links are one of the most common — and most damaging — SEO problems a website can have. Google's crawler visits your site regularly and records every link that fails to load. Too many broken links signal poor site maintenance and can quietly push your rankings down. Worse, real visitors clicking dead links simply leave.
The problem is that broken links are almost impossible to spot manually. You have to click every link on every page, including links to external sites that may have changed or disappeared without any warning. Most website owners only find out about broken links when a user emails to complain.
What Counts as a Broken Link?
A broken link is any hyperlink that returns an error when followed. The most common types are:
| Status | Meaning | SEO Impact |
|---|---|---|
| 404 Not Found | Page no longer exists | High — Google marks it as dead |
| 410 Gone | Page permanently removed | High — signals intentional removal |
| 500 Server Error | Page crashed | High — unrecoverable on that visit |
| Redirect chain (3+) | Multiple redirects before destination | Medium — wastes crawl budget |
Note: 403 Forbidden responses often indicate bot-blocking rather than a genuinely broken page — these are usually fine for real visitors.
Why Broken Links Hurt Your SEO
- Wasted crawl budget — Google spends time crawling your site but hits dead ends instead of finding useful content.
- Lost link equity — If you link to an external page that returns a 404, any SEO value that might have flowed through that link is lost.
- Poor user experience signals — Visitors who hit broken links leave immediately. High bounce rates from dead pages hurt rankings over time.
- Redirect chains slow pages down — Three or more redirects before a destination add measurable latency and hurt Core Web Vitals scores.
Key point: Broken links can appear at any time — when you reorganise your site, when an external site deletes a page, or when a domain expires. Checking once is not enough.
How to Find Broken Links
Manual checking
You can check links manually by clicking through your site and looking for error pages. This works for very small sites with fewer than 20 pages, but becomes impractical at any real scale and misses broken external links entirely.
Free one-off tools
Tools like W3C Link Checker let you scan a URL for free. The limitation: you have to remember to run them, and most people forget. Broken links can appear any week.
Automated weekly monitoring
The most reliable approach is automated weekly monitoring. A tool crawls your entire site on a schedule and emails you a report of everything that needs fixing — no manual checking required.
LinkWatch crawls your website every week and emails you a health report covering broken links, redirect chains (3+ hops), slow pages (>3s), and SSL expiry warnings — all in one email every Monday.
Start monitoring — $8/month →How to Fix Broken Links
Internal broken links (pages on your own site)
- Update the link — If the page moved, update the href to the new URL.
- Restore the page — If the page was accidentally deleted, restore it or recreate it.
- Add a 301 redirect — If the URL permanently changed, add a server-side redirect from the old URL to the new one. This preserves SEO value.
- Remove the link — If the destination no longer exists and there is no replacement, remove the link entirely.
External broken links (links to other sites)
- Find an alternative — Search for a replacement page covering the same topic and update your link.
- Remove the link — If no good replacement exists, remove the outbound link. A missing link is better than a dead one.
- Use the Wayback Machine — If the content is valuable and no live version exists, you can sometimes link to an archived copy at web.archive.org.
Redirect chains
A redirect chain occurs when URL A redirects to URL B, which redirects to URL C. Fix them by updating all links to point directly to the final destination URL, bypassing intermediate redirects.
SSL Certificate Expiry
An expired SSL certificate doesn't create a broken link — it creates something worse. Browsers display a full-screen security warning that blocks users from reaching your site at all. Monitor your certificate's expiry date and renew it at least 30 days before it expires.
How Often Should You Check?
Weekly is the right cadence for most sites. Daily is overkill. Monthly means broken links can persist for weeks. A weekly Monday morning report gives you fresh data at the start of each work week when you're most likely to act on it.
LinkWatch monitors your site every week and sends your broken link report every Monday morning. No login, no dashboard — just results in your inbox.
Monitor my site for $8/month →Frequently Asked Questions
Will fixing broken links immediately improve my rankings?
Not immediately — Google needs to recrawl your site. Once it does, the improved crawl quality will generally have a positive signal over time.
How many broken links is too many?
Even one broken link on a key page is worth fixing. The priority is internal 404s and redirect chains on important pages.
Do broken links to external sites matter as much as internal ones?
Internal broken links are more damaging. Broken external links are lower priority but still worth fixing to maintain content quality signals.