Broken links: how to find and fix them
A broken link is one that leads to a page that no longer exists: the visitor clicks and meets a 404 error instead of what they expected.
It happens constantly and almost always unnoticed, because whoever placed the link rarely clicks it again. On a site that has been running for a few years, finding dozens of them is normal.
Why they matter
- For your visitor: a 404 is a dead end. The person came to do something and leaves without doing it.
- For the search engine: you spend crawl budget on pages that do not exist, and broken internal links cut the path an engine follows to discover the rest of your site.
- For your credibility: a site full of dead links looks abandoned, and that impression rubs off on whatever you sell.
Where they come from
Almost always from changes that looked harmless: you renamed a page and did not update what linked to it, you deleted a discontinued product, you moved a section, or you linked to someone else's site that later shut down. The internal ones are yours to cause and yours to fix; the external ones depend on others, but you can still remove or replace them.
How to find them
By hand it is hopeless: nobody is going to click every link on every page. The practical way is to run a crawler that walks the site the way a search engine would, follows each link and notes the status code each one answers with.
A 404 is "not found" and a 410 is "gone": those are the broken ones. A 500 is a server failure, worth looking at separately.
How to fix them
- If the page moved: correct the link to point at the new address, or put a 301 redirect from the old one to the new.
- If the page is gone for good: link to the closest alternative, or drop the link if there is none. Do not leave it pointing at nothing.
- If it is a dead external link: check whether the resource lives at another address; if not, remove it.
- Look after your 404 page: however many you fix, some will always slip through, so make your error page offer a search box and useful links rather than a blank notice.
An audit with Screaming Cow crawls your site, follows every link and hands you the list of the broken ones, with the page each is found on, so you know exactly where to go and fix it.
These look at one page
An audit crawls the whole site and reports what is wrong across every page it finds.
Audit a site