Broken Links Accumulate Like Dust. Ignore Them Long Enough and They Suffocate Your Site.
You link to an external resource. That resource moves. Your link breaks.
You delete a product page. Internal links still point to it. Broken.
You restructure your navigation. Old footer links do not update. Broken.
It happens gradually. And nobody notices until it is a problem.
The SEO Impact
Internal broken links waste crawl budget and create dead ends in your site architecture. External broken links provide a poor user experience.
Backlinks from other sites pointing to your deleted pages? Those are broken too. Link equity wasted. Understanding link quality vs quantity makes this even more painful — you could be losing your best links.
How to Find Them
Crawl your site with Screaming Frog. Filter for 404 responses. Sort by number of inlinks. The broken internal links with the most referring pages are your priority.
Check Google Search Console for crawl errors. Look at the "Page not found (404)" section.
How to Fix Them
Update internal links to point to the correct URLs. 301 redirect deleted pages to relevant alternatives. Fix or remove broken external links. Check Google Search Console for crawl errors regularly.
How to Prevent Them
Run a crawl monthly. Set up monitoring for critical pages. Before deleting any page, check what links to it internally and externally.
Broken link monitoring is one of 113 tasks in seocheckup.app. Free. No credit card. 30 seconds.