Question 1

How do broken links affect SEO?

Accepted Answer

Broken links (404 errors) harm SEO in multiple ways. Internally, they waste crawl budget and disrupt the flow of PageRank through your site. Externally, broken inbound links from other sites mean lost link equity — the referring domain is pointing to a dead URL and that signal is wasted. Broken links also degrade user experience, increasing bounce rate and reducing time on site. Google does not penalise sites for having some broken links, but a site with many 404 errors signals poor maintenance, which can indirectly harm crawling efficiency and rankings.

Question 2

What is the best way to fix broken links?

Accepted Answer

For internal broken links: either update the link to the correct URL, create a redirect from the dead URL to the live page, or remove the link. For external broken links that are inbound (backlinks pointing to 404 pages on your site): set up 301 redirects from the dead URL to the most relevant live page to reclaim the link equity. For outbound broken links (links from your page to external sites): find an updated version of the destination, link to an archive.org cached version, or remove the link entirely. Check for broken links at least monthly using a crawler or this tool.

Broken Link Checker

What gets checked