How to Find and Fix Broken Links

Internal broken links are the bigger SEO concern. They send users (and crawlers) to dead ends, waste your crawl budget on requests that return 404, and prevent link equity from flowing through your site's internal link graph. A site with hundreds of internal 404s effectively has hundreds of leaks in its authority distribution.

External broken links are smaller but still meaningful. They erode user trust (clicking a link and getting 'site not found' looks unprofessional), and they degrade your content's perceived freshness — Google notices when a site's references stop resolving.

Three tool stacks, in order of cost:

• Free: Google Search Console > Pages report > 'Not found (404)' filter shows internal 404s Google has crawled. Limited to URLs Google found, but covers the most important ones.
• Low-cost: Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free for sites under 500 URLs, paid for larger sites). Crawls your full site and produces a 'Response Codes' report listing every URL by status code. Can also crawl outbound links to check external 404s.
• Comprehensive: Ahrefs or Semrush Site Audit. Continuous crawl, full broken-link reporting (internal and external), historical tracking of when links broke, and integration with backlink data so you can prioritize fixing pages that have inbound links pointing to 404s.

Each broken link gets one of four fixes depending on what changed.

• Redirect: if a page was deleted but a closely-equivalent page exists, set up a 301 from the old URL to the equivalent. This recovers the link equity flowing into the old URL.
• Update the linking page: if the URL changed (e.g., from /old-slug to /new-slug) and you have access to the page that contains the broken link, update the link to point at the new URL.
• Replace the external link: if an external link points to a dead page, find the current authoritative source on the same topic and link to that instead.
• Remove the link: if no equivalent exists and the link is no longer needed, just remove it. Better than leaving a dead link.

The highest-priority 404s to fix are pages that had backlinks before they broke. Those backlinks are passing equity to a 404, which captures none of it. Set up a 301 from the broken URL to the closest topically-relevant live page — the link equity then flows to the destination.

Use Ahrefs > Best by Links report (filtered to 404 status), or run a backlinks-by-status audit in Semrush, to find your highest-equity broken pages first.

Internal: every URL change should generate a 301 from the old URL automatically (most modern CMSes do this if configured). Run a quarterly Screaming Frog crawl to catch new 404s before they accumulate. External: any link to a third-party site is a long-term liability — for evergreen content, use an archive link (web.archive.org) for citations to time-sensitive sources, and prefer linking to authoritative high-permanence sources (.gov, .edu, major publishers) over ephemeral ones.