There is a flyer in a drawer somewhere with your website printed on it, and underneath the address, in smaller type, a second line pointing at a page called something like /specials. You had a specials page. You took it down the year the specials stopped, and the flyer kept going out in takeaway bags for another eleven months after that, politely directing people to a room with no floor.
Nobody told the flyer. Nobody tells the links either.
Broken links are the one SEO problem that gets worse while you do nothing, because every month you publish, reorganise or delete something, and each of those is a chance to point an arrow at a page that stopped existing. The good news is that finding them takes about twenty minutes and costs nothing. The less good news is the part where you find out how many there are.
What counts as a broken link
A broken link is any link that sends someone to a page that is not there, and the server answers with a 404, which is the internet's way of shrugging. That is the whole definition. It is not a link that is ugly, or old, or pointing somewhere you have since changed your mind about.
The part people get wrong is assuming the problem is other people's websites. It usually isn't. The majority of broken links I find on a small business site are internal, which is to say the site is linking to itself and missing, and that happens because you renamed a page, moved a post into a different folder, or deleted a service you stopped offering and forgot that four other pages still pointed at it.
External broken links, the ones pointing at somebody else's site that quietly died, are real and worth fixing, but they are the second job. Your own are the first, because those are the ones you can do something about this afternoon.
How to find every broken link on your site
You have three options and you should use the first two, because between them they catch almost everything without you installing anything.
Start in Google Search Console, under Indexing and then Pages. It keeps a list of every URL Google has tried to reach and tells you which ones came back as not found, which is genuinely the most useful free report in SEO and the one almost nobody opens. The advantage here is that these are the broken links Google has actually hit, so they are the ones costing you something rather than the theoretical ones.
Then run a crawler over the whole site. Screaming Frog is free up to five hundred URLs, which covers most small business sites with room to spare, and it walks every link on every page the way a search engine would and hands you a column of status codes. Sort that column by 404 and you have your list. It will take longer to download the thing than to run it.
The third option is to click around your own site looking for problems, and I mention it only to tell you not to rely on it. You built the site. You know the routes. You will walk the three paths you always walk, find nothing, and conclude the site is fine, which is how broken links survive for years on sites run by careful people.
What a 404 does to your rankings, and what it doesn't
Here is where most advice overstates things, so let me be precise about it. Google does not hand out a penalty for having 404s. A page that no longer exists returning a 404 is correct behaviour, it is what that code is for, and a site with a handful of them is a normal site rather than a broken one.
What broken links do cost you is subtler and still worth caring about. Every time a crawler walks into a dead page it spends a request learning nothing, and on a small site with a limited crawl budget that is attention your real pages wanted. More importantly, when a page that had earned links and rankings disappears without a redirect, everything that page had built up goes with it, which is the expensive part and the one people only notice three months later when traffic is down and nobody can say why.
The visitor side is simpler. Someone searched for you, clicked, and landed on an error, and they are not going to email you about it. They are going to assume something is wrong with the business and go back to the results page, where your competitor is waiting, having done nothing to earn it.
Fixing them in the right order
Not every broken link deserves the same treatment, and sorting them properly is most of the job.
- If the page moved, redirect it. A 301 from the old address to the new one passes along the rankings that page had, and Google's own guidance on redirects is clear that this is the intended way to move a page. Point it at the closest real equivalent, not at something vaguely related.
- If the link is just wrong, fix the link. A typo in a href does not need a redirect built around it. Correct the href and move on, and resist the urge to solve a spelling mistake with infrastructure.
- If the page is genuinely gone, let it 404. A service you no longer offer should not quietly become a redirect to something you do offer, because the person who clicked wanted the thing that is gone. Give them a 404 page that says so and offers somewhere useful to go next.
- Never blanket-redirect everything to the homepage. This is the one that looks tidy on a report and throws away everything the old page earned. Google treats a redirect to an irrelevant page as a soft 404 anyway, so you get the ranking loss and the error, which is an impressive way to make a problem worse.
- Update the internal links too. A redirect stops the error, but the link on your own page is still pointing at the old address, and leaving it there means every visitor takes a detour forever. Fix the source, then keep the redirect as a safety net for anyone arriving from that flyer.
The ones you'll make next month
You will fix all of these and then create new ones, which is not a character flaw, it is just what happens to a site that is being used. The fix is not vigilance. Nobody sustains vigilance about hyperlinks.
Set Search Console to email you, check the Pages report once a month, and run the crawler properly twice a year. That is the entire maintenance routine and it takes less time than the meeting you would hold about it. If a monthly fifteen minutes is not going to happen, and I say this with no judgement because it usually isn't, it belongs in whatever website maintenance plan is already looking after your updates and backups, where somebody else's calendar reminder does the remembering.
The bottom line
Broken links are not dramatic. They will not take your site down, they will not get you penalised, and you can ignore them for a long time without anything visibly going wrong, which is precisely why they accumulate on sites belonging to people who are otherwise extremely on top of things.
What they do is take the pages you worked hardest on and slowly disconnect them from everything else, until the site is less a structure than a pile of rooms. Somewhere out there a flyer is still sending people to /specials. You can't fix the flyer. You can make sure that when they arrive, there's a floor.
If you would rather someone else went looking, let's find out what's actually broken on yours.
