Every website accumulates broken links over time. Pages get deleted, URLs change, external sites go offline. It's a natural part of how the web evolves. But if you're not actively finding and fixing these dead links, they could be quietly dragging down your search engine rankings.
What Is a Broken Link?
A broken link (also called a dead link) is a hyperlink that points to a page or resource that no longer exists or can't be reached. When a visitor clicks a broken link, they'll typically see an error page instead of the content they expected.
Not all broken links are the same, though. Understanding the different types helps you prioritise which ones to fix first:
- 404 Not Found — The most common type. The destination page has been deleted or moved without a redirect. These are the highest priority to fix.
- Connection Timeouts — The destination server doesn't respond. This could be a temporary issue, but persistent timeouts are just as bad as a 404 for your visitors.
- SSL Certificate Errors — The link points to an HTTPS page with an expired or invalid certificate. Browsers will warn visitors before letting them through, which almost always results in a bounce.
- Server Errors (5xx) — The destination server encountered an internal error. If these are on your own site, they need urgent attention.
How Broken Links Affect Your SEO
Search engines like Google use hundreds of ranking signals, and several of them are directly impacted by broken links on your site.
Wasted Crawl Budget
Search engines allocate a limited crawl budget to each website — the number of pages their bots will crawl in a given period. Every time Googlebot encounters a broken link and follows it to a dead page, that's a wasted crawl. On large sites with thousands of pages, excessive broken links can mean important pages don't get crawled and indexed as frequently as they should.
Lost Link Equity
Link equity (sometimes called "link juice") is the ranking value that flows from one page to another through hyperlinks. When a page links to a URL that returns a 404, that link equity effectively disappears. If you've earned valuable backlinks from other websites but those backlinks now point to broken pages on your site, you're losing the SEO benefit of every single one.
Poor User Experience
Google has made it clear that user experience is a ranking factor. When visitors hit dead links on your site, it signals to search engines that your site isn't well maintained. Visitors who encounter broken links are less likely to trust your content, less likely to stay on your site, and less likely to return.
Increased Bounce Rate
When a visitor clicks a link and lands on an error page, they'll almost certainly hit the back button — or leave your site entirely. High bounce rates tell search engines that visitors aren't finding what they're looking for, which can negatively influence your rankings over time.
How Often Should You Check?
The right frequency depends on your site's size and how often you update content. As a general rule:
- Small sites (under 50 pages) — Monthly checks are usually sufficient.
- Medium sites (50-500 pages) — Fortnightly checks help catch issues before they accumulate.
- Large sites (500+ pages) — Weekly automated checks are recommended, especially if you publish frequently or link to many external resources.
External links tend to break more often than internal ones, since you have no control over other websites. If your content links heavily to third-party resources, check more frequently.
What We See in Real Audits
The theory above explains why broken links matter. The numbers below come from a decade of running link audits on client sites. They're not a research study with a published methodology — they're ranges we've come to expect from the patterns we keep finding.
Typical broken-link counts by site age and type
- New small business sites (under 1 year old): usually 0–5 broken links. The most common cause is typos in URLs copied from emails or documents.
- Established sites (3–5 years old): typically 10–40 broken links across the whole site. The bulk are stale outbound references in blog content and footer links to retired social profiles.
- Mature sites (10+ years old): can have anywhere from 50 to several hundred broken links. The biggest contributor is external link rot in old blog content — roughly 5–10% of external links break per year on average, and that compounds.
- Sites that recently migrated CMS or domain: 20–200+ broken internal links in the weeks after launch, almost always because redirects weren't set up exhaustively. We've seen migrations where the homepage was the only URL that redirected properly; everything deep-linked from external sources 404'd.
Where broken links cluster
If you only have time to check a few places, check these first — this is where the highest-impact broken links nearly always hide.
- Footer. The global footer is the most consistently neglected part of a website. Old social handles, retired services, "Coming soon" pages that never launched. Because it's on every page, one broken footer link can mean thousands of broken-link instances by URL count.
- Sidebar widgets. Especially on WordPress sites — "Recent posts" widgets that pull from old archives, "Recommended reading" lists that haven't been edited in years.
- The first paragraph of old blog posts. When citing a study, source, or external article, writers naturally link in the opening paragraph. Five years later, that's where the highest concentration of dead citations lives.
- "Resources" or "Tools we recommend" pages. These are roll-ups of external links that age fast and rarely get reviewed.
- Image and PDF references. Documents and images moved during a CMS migration often leave behind references in old posts pointing to URLs that no longer resolve.
- Email newsletters embedded as web pages. Newsletter archives often link to time-sensitive content (event pages, sign-ups, limited offers) that have been taken down.
What changes after a clean-up
The clearest, fastest improvement we see after a broken-link clean-up is in crawl behaviour. Within two or three weeks of fixing the bulk of internal broken links on a medium-sized site, Search Console's crawl stats typically show a marked increase in pages indexed per crawl and a corresponding decrease in time-since-last-crawl for important pages.
Rankings move more slowly. We've never seen broken-link cleanup alone move a page from page 5 of Google to page 1. What we have seen, repeatedly, is sites that were stagnating in mid-page-2 rankings climb into page 1 after a combined fix of broken internal links plus a 301-redirect cleanup. The broken links aren't the only factor — but they're often the cheapest one to fix, and they remove a friction that's holding back everything else.
Where broken links don't matter much
In the interest of not overselling: there are places we've consistently found broken links to have minimal impact:
- Broken links in pages that aren't indexed (admin pages, gated content, account pages).
- Broken links in archive pages that get almost no traffic and aren't part of any ranking strategy.
- Broken links to social platforms when the platform itself has been retired (e.g. Google+, old Vine handles). Visitors recognise these as ancient and don't blame the site for them.
The triage framework is straightforward: high-traffic pages first, then commercially important pages, then everything else.
How to Fix Broken Links
Once you've identified broken links using a tool like Broken Link Finder, you have three options for each one:
Set Up a Redirect
If the content has moved to a new URL, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. This preserves any link equity that was flowing to the original page and ensures visitors reach the right content. This is the best option when the content still exists somewhere.
Update the Link
If you know the correct destination, simply update the link to point to the right page. This is the cleanest solution and avoids redirect chains. Check your canonical URLs at the same time to make sure everything is consistent.
Remove the Link
If the destination no longer exists and there's no suitable replacement, remove the link entirely. A piece of text with no link is better than a link that leads to a dead end.
Build the habit
The easiest way to keep broken links under control is to scan your top pages regularly. The scanner on this site checks every link on a page and categorises them by status — broken, redirect, working — for free, with no sign-up. A monthly fifteen-minute scan of your top ten pages catches most of what matters before it accumulates.
For deeper background, the blog has guides on fixing 404 errors, flattening redirect chains, and migrating without losing rankings.