Indexability and crawling
How to find and fix broken internal links
Your own pages link to pages that are gone. Readers follow the link and hit a dead end, and search engines spend crawl budget on URLs that lead nowhere.
What it is, and what it costs
How to fix it
Update each link to the new address, or remove it if the target is gone for good. The page each broken link sits on is listed beside it, so you know where to edit.
How to check your site
Crawl the site: a crawler follows every internal link and reports the ones that 404, along with the page they came from. WordPress users can also use a broken-link plugin, though a full crawl is more thorough.
What this looks like in practice
A blog with years of posts had dozens of links to old case-study URLs that had since moved. Readers on high-traffic articles were dead-ending on 404s. Repointing the links kept them moving through the site.
Questions people ask
- Do broken internal links hurt ranking directly?
- Not much on their own, but they waste crawl budget and weaken internal linking, and they clearly hurt the reader, which is reason enough to fix them.
Does your site have this?
Check your site to find internal links that lead to dead pages.
See also
- How to fix canonical tag problemsA canonical tag names the real URL for a page when the same content is reachable more than one way. Getting it wrong is quieter than most SEO faults: nothing on the page looks broken, and its value quietly goes to the wrong address — or to one that cannot rank at all.
- How to fix XML sitemap problemsA sitemap is how search engines discover pages your own links do not lead to well, and how they learn something changed. Two things go wrong with it: there is not one, or the one you have lists URLs that do not work.
- How to fix a page accidentally set to “noindex”If a page you care about is nowhere in Google, not even when you search its exact title, a noindex tag is the first thing to rule out. It is one line, it overrides everything else you do for that page, and it usually got there by accident.
- How to fix a robots.txt that blocks your whole siteDisallow: / in your robots.txt is the fastest way to disappear from search. It asks every crawler to skip the whole site at once, and it is a common leftover from launch day.