Broken Links: Why They Pile Up, and How to Find Them Before Visitors Do
A link that worked at launch can silently break the moment its destination changes — and nothing tells you unless you check. Here's why broken links pile up and how to find them.
Why broken links pile up on every site
A link that worked perfectly on launch day can break silently the moment its destination changes — a page gets renamed, deleted, or the whole site it pointed to disappears. Nothing on your own page tells you when that happens. Unlike a typo or a broken image, a dead link produces no visible symptom until someone actually clicks it, which means they accumulate quietly as a site grows and ages, entirely out of proportion to how much effort it would take to catch them early.
Internal versus external broken links
The two matter differently. An internal broken link — pointing to a page that no longer exists on your own site — wastes crawl budget (Googlebot follows the link and hits a dead end instead of a real page) and is entirely within your control to fix. An external broken link — pointing to a now-dead page on someone else's site — doesn't cost crawl budget the same way, but it still damages user trust and disrupts whatever a visitor was doing when they clicked it.
CheckSEO's Broken Link Checker scans a page's links and flags every one that returns a 404, error, or timeout — no signup.
Scan a page for broken linksDoes this actually hurt rankings?
Not as a large direct ranking factor on its own — a handful of broken links won't tank a well-built site. The real damage is compounding and indirect: wasted crawl budget on larger sites, worse engagement metrics when visitors bounce off a dead end, and a general signal of an unmaintained site that correlates with — even where it doesn't directly cause — weaker overall SEO health.
5 ways broken links typically happen
A page gets renamed or moved without a redirect
The single most common cause. Whatever else changes, a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one prevents every link pointing at the old address from breaking at once.
Content gets deleted without checking what linked to it
Removing a page is easy; finding every internal link that pointed to it first is the step that usually gets skipped.
A site migration or replatform drops old URL patterns
Moving to a new CMS or URL structure without mapping old paths to new ones turns every internal link built under the old pattern into a broken one simultaneously.
Linked external resources go offline
Not within your control, but worth periodically re-checking — a site you linked to years ago can shut down, get redesigned, or let its domain lapse without any warning to you.
Typos in manually typed URLs
A single mistyped character in a hand-written link produces a URL that never worked in the first place, often going unnoticed because it looks correct at a glance.
How to fix what you find
For each broken link: if a live replacement exists, update the link (or redirect the old destination if you control it) rather than leaving the dead one in place. If there's genuinely no equivalent page anymore, remove the link entirely — a missing link is a smaller problem than a dead-end one, since it doesn't actively invite a click that goes nowhere.
Check your own page
CheckSEO's Broken Link Checker scans every link on a page and reports exactly which ones fail, so you're not clicking through a page by hand looking for dead ends.
Frequently asked questions
What is a broken link?
A link that points to a URL that no longer works — most commonly a 404 (page not found), but also timeouts, server errors, or a domain that's expired entirely. The link itself still exists on your page; only the destination is dead.
How do I find broken links on my website?
Run a broken link checker against the page — it follows every link and reports which ones return an error, instead of you clicking through each link by hand.
How do I fix broken links?
If the destination moved, update the link to the new URL (or 301 redirect the old destination to the new one if you control it). If there's no live equivalent, remove the link rather than leaving a dead end.
Do broken links hurt SEO?
Not as a large direct ranking factor on their own, but the compounding effects are real: wasted crawl budget on larger sites, a worse user experience that increases bounce rate, and a general signal of an unmaintained site.
Is a 404 the same as a broken link?
A 404 is the most common cause of a broken link, but not the only one — a broken link can also be a server error, a timeout, or a domain that no longer resolves at all. A 404 specifically means the server responded but found nothing at that address.
Check your own site with the Broken Link Checker.
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