Finding and Fixing Broken Links and 404 Errors

Every site accumulates broken links over time — pages get deleted, URLs get restructured, third-party pages you linked to move or disappear. None of that is unusual. What separates a healthy site from one quietly bleeding traffic is whether anyone's checking, and whether the fix, when it happens, is the right one.

Why this is worth checking regularly

A broken link is a dead end for whoever clicks it — a visitor who was one click from your contact form instead lands on an error page and leaves. For search engines, it's a wasted crawl and a lost signal: internal links distribute authority between your pages, and external links pointing to a now-missing page represent earned signal that's no longer connecting to anything live. Left unaddressed, a site with a growing pile of broken links also just reads as poorly maintained — to visitors and, over time, to Google.

Where broken links come from

• Page deletion without a redirect — a service or blog page gets removed or replaced, but nothing points visitors or search engines to its replacement.
• URL restructuring — a site redesign or platform migration changes URL patterns site-wide, breaking every internal link and every external link pointing to the old structure at once.
• Typos in the link itself — a manually typed URL with a character wrong, easy to miss in a quick review.
• Third-party changes outside your control — a resource, tool, or article you linked to gets moved, renamed, or taken down on someone else's site.
• Expired or removed promotional content — a seasonal landing page or campaign page taken down after the promotion ends, with old links to it left dangling.

How to find them

Google Search Console

The Pages report under Indexing shows "Not found (404)" as a specific status — a list of URLs Google has tried to crawl and gotten a 404 from, which is a direct signal of what search engines are actually encountering, not just what a crawler tool theoretically finds.

A full site crawl

Crawling your own site with a tool like Screaming Frog (or a similar crawler) surfaces every internal link that resolves to a 4xx status code, plus a separate report of external links that are broken — something Search Console won't show you, since it only reports on your own indexed pages.

Manual spot checks

Periodically clicking through your main navigation, footer, and any recently published content catches issues a crawl might not prioritize, especially on smaller sites where a full crawl tool feels like overkill.

Fixing internal broken links

• If the destination page still exists at a different URL, update the link directly to point to the new URL — don't rely on a redirect to patch over a link you could simply fix.
• If the page is genuinely gone and there's a close, relevant replacement, redirect the old URL to the new one with a 301 redirect and update the link to point directly at the new destination rather than through the redirect.
• If there's no reasonable replacement, remove the link rather than leaving it pointing at a dead page.

Fixing external broken links (link reclamation)

When another site links to a page on yours that no longer exists, you generally can't edit their page — but you can make sure the link still leads somewhere useful. Set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the closest current equivalent, and that inbound link's value carries forward instead of dead-ending. For links from sites you have a relationship with, it's also worth a direct note asking them to update the link to the correct current URL, since a redirect adds a small amount of latency and an unnecessary hop compared to a direct, current link.

The mistake to avoid: redirecting everything to the homepage

It's tempting to "fix" every broken URL by pointing it at the homepage — no more 404s, problem solved. It isn't, really. A visitor who clicked a link expecting a specific service page and lands on your homepage instead still has to figure out where to go, which is a worse experience than a clear 404 page that at least explains what happened. And a homepage redirect from an irrelevant old URL provides a much weaker signal to Google than a redirect to a genuinely related page — or, in Google's eyes, can look like an attempt to preserve link equity through an unrelated jump rather than a real content match.

Building it into your regular maintenance

Broken links aren't a one-time cleanup — they accumulate continuously as pages change and third-party sites shift under you. A quarterly crawl, plus a monthly glance at Search Console's Pages report, catches most of it before it piles up. This matters most right before and after a site redesign, when URL structures are most likely to change all at once.