Broken Links SEO: Find Them, Fix Them, Reclaim Lost Equity
Broken links are a silent drain on site authority — every 404 is an interrupted PageRank flow, a wasted crawl budget hop, and a poor user experience signal. On sites that have been live for several years and undergone content updates or CMS migrations, broken links accumulate faster than most teams realize. This guide covers how to find every type of broken link, prioritize fixes by SEO impact, and reclaim the link equity you are currently losing.
How Broken Links Hurt SEO
A broken link (one pointing to a 404 or other error page) wastes one of your internal link equity hops on a dead end. When Googlebot follows a broken internal link and gets a 404, it wastes crawl budget and receives no PageRank to pass on. On large sites with many broken links, this can meaningfully reduce the crawl efficiency and authority flow across your site. Broken external links also signal site quality issues - sites that do not maintain their links look poorly maintained to both users and search engines.
Finding Broken Links
Screaming Frog is the fastest way to find all broken links on your site. Run a crawl, then go to Response Codes and filter for 4xx. This shows all pages returning 404 and which pages link to them. For a free option, Google Search Console under Indexing shows 404 errors that Googlebot encountered. Ahrefs and Semrush both have broken link reports in their site audit features. Check both internal broken links (links within your own site) and broken outbound links (links to other sites that have gone offline).
Fixing Internal Broken Links
For each broken internal link: if the page was deleted but had traffic and backlinks, restore it or create a 301 redirect to the most relevant existing page. If the page was moved and the URL changed, update the link to the new URL. If the page genuinely does not exist and should not, remove the link. After fixing, update your sitemap to reflect the current URLs and remove any 404 URLs that were in your sitemap.
Reclaiming Broken Backlinks
Broken external links pointing to your site (links from other websites pointing to deleted pages on your domain) are lost link equity you can reclaim. Use Ahrefs Site Explorer to find external links pointing to 404 pages on your domain. Create 301 redirects from those 404 URLs to relevant existing pages. This instantly recovers the PageRank those links were passing, often producing ranking improvements within a few weeks.
Preventing Broken Links
The best prevention: 301 redirect every deleted or moved page before it goes live. Never delete a URL without setting up the redirect first. If you use a CMS, install a redirect manager plugin so your team can create redirects easily. Set up Google Search Console email alerts for new coverage errors - you will be notified within days when new 404s appear from Googlebot.
Broken links in XML sitemaps
A sitemap containing 404 URLs is a direct quality signal to Google: you are submitting URLs that do not exist. Google Search Console Coverage report flags these as 'Submitted URL not found (404)'. Audit your sitemap regularly with SitemapFixer or by running your sitemap URLs through a status code checker. Remove any 404 or redirected URLs from your sitemap immediately — your sitemap should contain only canonical 200-status URLs. Set a recurring monthly reminder to re-validate your sitemap, especially after major content updates or CMS migrations.
Soft 404s vs hard 404s
A hard 404 returns an HTTP 404 status code, which Googlebot correctly identifies as a missing page. A soft 404 is a page that returns a 200 status code but displays a 'page not found' or empty results message — these are far more problematic for SEO because Google may try to index them as real pages. Common causes: search result pages with zero results, empty category pages, or CMS pages that display a not-found message while returning 200. Fix soft 404s by returning a proper 404 status code from the server or, if the page has a valid destination, with a 301 redirect. Check Google Search Console Coverage for 'Soft 404' warnings.
Managing broken outbound links at scale
On content-heavy sites, outbound links to third-party resources break silently when those resources go offline or change URLs. The W3C Link Checker, Ahrefs Site Audit, and Screaming Frog all crawl outbound links and report their status codes. For a low-effort approach: prioritize auditing outbound links in your most authoritative pages (your top-linked and highest-traffic content) first. Replace broken outbound links with working alternatives, use archive.org to find cached versions of pages that have gone offline, or simply remove the link if no suitable replacement exists.
404 page SEO best practices
Your custom 404 page must return a true 404 HTTP status code — not 200 (soft 404) and not 301 to your homepage. The page should include your site navigation so users can find relevant content, a search bar, links to your most popular pages, and a clear message explaining the page does not exist. Do not add 404 pages to your sitemap. Do not noindex your 404 template — Google should be able to crawl it to confirm it returns 404. A well-designed 404 page recovers some of the traffic that would otherwise bounce completely from a broken URL.