Broken Link

Overview

A broken link is a hyperlink that returns an error response because the page it points to no longer exists. The most common form is a server returning a 404 (Not Found), but a 410 (Gone) signaling permanent removal, a 400 indicating a bad request, or a 502 gateway error are all classed as broken links too. For visitors, an error screen appears instead of the content they were after, eroding trust; for search engines, it can signal that the site is poorly maintained.

A link may be internal, pointing to another page on the same site, or external, pointing to a different site. Either can break, and the impact on search engines and users differs in character between the two.

Common Causes

• A page is deleted without cleaning up the hyperlinks that pointed to it.
• A URL is changed or the site structure is reorganized without setting up appropriate redirects.
• An external site that you linked to deletes its content or moves it to a different address.
• Simple input errors such as a mistyped address, a missing slash, or the wrong protocol (http vs. https).

SEO and UX Impact

Internal broken links make a site harder for search engines to crawl and cut off the link equity flowing between pages, dragging down both technical SEO health and search visibility. Outbound broken links may not directly damage rankings, but they hurt user experience and lower the perceived trustworthiness of your content.

Google treats 404 and 410 as effectively the same. According to its official documentation, every 4xx error except 429 is passed to the next processing stage as a signal that "the content does not exist": an already-indexed URL is dropped from the index, and a newly discovered 404 page is not processed. Crawling frequency for that URL also declines gradually. That said, 4xx errors (other than 429) do not affect the crawl rate for the site as a whole.

Soft 404

A soft 404 occurs when a missing page returns a 200 (OK) response while serving the homepage or a blank error screen. Search engines waste time crawling duplicate URLs that do not really exist, so the genuinely important, unique pages are discovered later or visited less often. Because soft 404 pages are excluded from the index and never surface in search results, configuring missing pages to return a clear 404 or 410 rather than a 200 is better for the site's crawl coverage.

Diagnosis and Remediation

Start by finding broken links with a site audit tool. Semrush's Site Audit surfaces internal and external broken links together with the pages that contain them and the HTTP status code returned, while Ahrefs' Site Audit checks both outbound 404 links (External 404 links) and broken inbound links pointing to your site. Google Search Console's indexing report also lists URLs classified as 404 or soft 404.

Once found, handle each case according to whether the link is internal or external.

The cleanest fix is a 301 redirect. Permanently mapping the old URL to the closest-matching new page passes the existing link equity to that page and sends visitors to a working page instead of an error screen. Below are 301 redirect examples for Apache (.htaccess) and Nginx.

# Apache (.htaccess)
Redirect 301 /old-page/ https://example.com/new-page/

# Nginx
location = /old-page/ {
    return 301 https://example.com/new-page/;
}

Broken Link Building

Broken link building is the opposite of fixing your own links: it is a backlink acquisition technique in which you find a dead external link on another site and offer your content as a replacement in its place. The other site restores its page quality by swapping a dead link for a working one, and you earn a new backlink in return. It only works when a genuinely suitable replacement exists, so the prerequisite is preparing a page that matches the dead original in topic and depth.

Execution Checklist

• Regularly check internal and external broken links with Site Audit (Semrush, Ahrefs) and Search Console.
• Redirect moved pages with a 301 to the closest-matching target.
• Have URLs with no replacement page return a clear 404 or 410 rather than a 200.
• Find soft 404s (empty error pages returning a 200) and correct them to the right status code.
• Replace external broken links with a reliable alternative source, or remove them.
• When redesigning a site or changing URLs in bulk, write the redirect mapping first, then deploy.

References

• Google Search Central — HTTP status codes, network errors, and DNS errors
• Google Search Central Blog — Crawl errors now reports soft 404s
• Semrush — Broken Links: Common Causes and How to Fix Them
• Page One Power — How to Find and Fix Broken Backlinks