Broken links (also called dead links) are hyperlinks that point to URLs returning error responses — most commonly 404 (Not Found). They harm SEO in three ways: they waste crawl budget (Googlebot crawls broken URLs instead of useful pages), they lose link equity (backlinks pointing to 404 pages deliver no ranking benefit), and they damage user experience (visitors clicking broken links encounter an error page). Finding and fixing broken links is a standard technical SEO maintenance task that should be performed regularly.
Broken links accumulate naturally over time — pages are deleted or reorganised, external sites change their URLs, and content management systems sometimes generate broken links through plugin updates or migration errors. A site with hundreds of broken internal and external links is wasting SEO potential and frustrating users unnecessarily.
How to find and fix broken links
- Find internal broken links — crawl the site with Screaming Frog or Ahrefs; filter for 4xx response codes; this shows all pages linking to 404 URLs
- Find broken backlinks — use Ahrefs or Semrush to identify external backlinks pointing to 404 pages on your site
- Fix internal broken links — update the links in the source page content to point to the correct URL, or delete the link if the destination no longer exists
- Redirect broken URL targets — if a previously existing URL now returns 404 and has backlinks, create a 301 redirect to the most relevant existing page
- Google Search Console Coverage report — shows 404 errors encountered by Googlebot; prioritise fixing pages with backlinks
- Monitor regularly — schedule monthly crawl checks; fix new broken links before they accumulate
No — redirecting all 404 pages to the homepage is a poor practice known as a 'soft 404'. It prevents users from understanding that the original page is genuinely gone, and Google treats homepage redirects for non-homepage URLs as soft 404s, which do not transfer link equity. The correct approach is to redirect 404 URLs to the most relevant existing page — the closest content match to what the original URL contained. Only redirect to the homepage if no meaningful content match exists on the site.
When a previously existing page (that had external backlinks) now returns 404, create a 301 redirect from that URL to the most relevant existing page on the site. This transfers the backlink equity accumulated by the old URL to the new destination. This process — often called 'reclaiming' broken backlinks — is one of the most efficient link building techniques available, as the links already exist and just need a redirect to channel their authority correctly.