How to Find and Fix Broken Links (Before They Kill Your SEO)

Broken links are one of the most common — and most ignored — SEO problems on the web. They sit quietly on your pages, sending visitors to dead ends and telling Google your site isn't being looked after.

The worst part? Most website owners have no idea they exist until rankings start dropping.

In this guide you'll learn exactly what broken links are, why they damage your SEO, and how to find and fix every single one — even on a large site.

What Are Broken Links and Why Do They Happen?

A broken link is any hyperlink that leads to a page that no longer exists — returning a 404 error to the visitor and to Google's crawler. They're sometimes called dead links.

They happen for completely normal reasons:

• A page was deleted or moved without a redirect

• An external website you linked to changed its URL or shut down

• A typo in the original URL when the link was added

• A website migration that didn't properly redirect old URLs

There are two types you need to care about.

Internal Broken Links

These are links between your own pages — for example, a blog post linking to a service page that was later deleted. Internal broken links are entirely within your control and should be fixed immediately. They stop PageRank from flowing correctly around your site.

External Broken Links

These are links from your site pointing to other websites that have since moved or removed their content. While you can't control what other sites do, leaving external broken links on your pages makes your content look outdated and unreliable to both readers and Google.

How Broken Links Hurt Your SEO

You might be wondering — does Google really care about a few broken links? The answer is yes, and for several compounding reasons.

Wasted Crawl Budget

Google doesn't crawl your entire website at once. It assigns a crawl budget — a limit on how many pages it will visit in a given period. Every time Googlebot follows a broken link and hits a 404 page, it wastes part of that budget on a dead end instead of discovering and indexing your real content.

For larger sites with hundreds or thousands of pages, this is a significant problem.

Lost PageRank

PageRank — Google's measure of page authority — flows through internal links. When a link points to a broken page, that PageRank simply disappears. It doesn't flow anywhere. Fix the link to a working page and that authority starts flowing again immediately.

Poor User Experience Signals

When a visitor clicks a link and lands on a 404 page, they leave. That increases your bounce rate and reduces dwell time — both indirect signals that tell Google this page isn't providing a good experience.

How to Find Broken Links on Your Website

Manually checking links one by one is not realistic for any site with more than a handful of pages. You need a tool that crawls your site the same way Google does.

Use an SEO Audit Tool

The fastest way is to run a full site audit. SEO Reporty's free SEO audit tool crawls every page of your website and flags all broken internal and external links in one report — including the exact page where the broken link lives, so you know precisely where to go to fix it.

Run an audit, filter for 404 errors, and you have your complete broken link list in under five minutes.

Use Google Search Console

Google Search Console shows you broken links that Google has already discovered:

1. Log into Google Search Console

2. Go to Pages in the left sidebar

3. Filter by Not indexed → Not found (404)

4. Export the list

This shows you which broken URLs Google tried to crawl — but it won't tell you which page on your site contains the broken link, so you still need an audit tool to trace it back to the source.

For Small Sites — Browser Extension

If your site has fewer than 50 pages, you can use a free browser extension like Check My Links (Chrome) to highlight broken links on a page-by-page basis. Not practical for large sites, but useful for a quick spot check.

How to Fix Broken Links Step by Step

Once you have your list, fixing broken links is straightforward. Here's how to handle each type.

Fix Internal Broken Links

For each internal broken link you find:

1. Go to the page that contains the broken link

2. Edit the link to point to the correct, working URL

3. If the destination page no longer exists, either link to the most relevant live page or remove the link entirely

4. If the page was moved, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one (see below)

Fix External Broken Links

For each external broken link:

1. Check if the destination website moved the page — search for the content title and find the new URL

2. If found, update your link to the new URL

3. If the content no longer exists anywhere, replace the link with a different credible source covering the same topic

4. If you can't find a replacement, remove the link and rephrase the sentence so it reads naturally without it

Set Up 301 Redirects for Moved Pages

If a page on your site has moved to a new URL, always set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. A 301 redirect tells Google "this page has permanently moved here" and passes the full PageRank of the old URL to the new one.

Without a 301 redirect, every link pointing to that old URL — internal and external — becomes a broken link overnight.

In WordPress, use the Redirection plugin. On other platforms, 301 redirects are usually set in your .htaccess file or your hosting dashboard.

How to Prevent Broken Links in the Future

Fixing broken links once is not enough — new ones appear regularly, especially on active sites. Here's how to stay on top of them:

• Run a monthly SEO audit — set a reminder to audit your site once a month using SEO Reporty. Catching broken links early means fewer pages affected.

• Always set a redirect before deleting a page — make it a rule in your team: no page gets deleted without a 301 redirect in place first.

• Check links before publishing — before hitting publish on any new post or page, click every link you've added to verify it works.

• Monitor Google Search Console weekly — the Pages report flags new 404s as Google finds them, giving you an early warning system.

According to Ahrefs, the average website has broken links on over 40% of its pages. That means the majority of websites are silently leaking PageRank and frustrating visitors right now — and most owners don't know it.