Do Broken Links Affect SEO? The Complete Guide for 2026

TL;DR: Yes, broken links negatively impact SEO by wasting crawl budget, disrupting internal link equity, increasing bounce rates, and signaling poor site maintenance to search engines. While Google won't directly penalize you for a few 404s, accumulated broken links compound into serious ranking problems.

If you've ever wondered whether those 404 errors scattered across your site are actually hurting your search rankings, the answer is a clear yes. Broken links create a cascade of problems that affect how search engines crawl, index, and rank your pages. The damage isn't always obvious because it compounds gradually, but the cumulative effect on your organic traffic can be significant.

What Are Broken Links?

A broken link is any hyperlink that points to a page or resource that no longer exists or can't be reached. When a browser or search engine crawler follows a broken link, they receive an error response instead of the expected content.

The most common types include 404 Not Found errors where the page was deleted or never existed, 410 Gone errors where the page was intentionally removed, 500 Internal Server Errors where the destination server has a problem, and timeout errors where the server doesn't respond. Internal broken links point to pages within your own site, while external broken links point to other websites. Both affect SEO, but in different ways and to different degrees.

How Broken Links Impact SEO

1. Wasted Crawl Budget

Every website gets a limited crawl budget from search engines. This is the number of pages Googlebot will crawl on your site within a given timeframe. When Googlebot encounters broken links, it still has to make the request, wait for the error response, and process the result. Each broken link consumes crawl resources that could have been spent discovering and indexing actual content.

Google's own documentation states that pages returning 4xx status codes don't technically waste crawl budget. However, the crawl attempt still consumes resources, and the time spent fetching error pages is time not spent crawling your valuable content. For sites with hundreds or thousands of pages, this matters.

Small sites with a few dozen pages likely won't notice crawl budget issues from broken links. But content-heavy blogs, ecommerce sites with many product pages, and SaaS sites with dynamic content can see real indexing delays when broken links accumulate.

2. Lost Internal Link Equity

Internal links distribute authority (PageRank) across your site. When you link from one page to another, you're telling search engines that the destination page is important and passing some ranking power to it. When an internal link points to a 404 page, that link equity disappears entirely.

Consider a pillar page about website security that links to ten supporting articles. If three of those articles were deleted without redirects, your pillar page is leaking authority through broken links rather than strengthening your content cluster. The remaining seven articles also lose the indirect benefit of a strong, well-connected content structure.

This loss compounds over time. As more internal links break, the overall authority distribution across your site becomes less efficient, and pages that depend on internal link equity for their rankings gradually lose ground.

3. Poor User Experience

When users encounter a 404 error, most of them leave. They hit the back button, try a different search result, or abandon their task entirely. This behavior shows up in your analytics as increased bounce rates and decreased time on site.

While Google has said that bounce rate isn't a direct ranking factor, user engagement signals do influence how search engines evaluate content quality. If users consistently leave your site after encountering dead ends, search engines take notice. Pages that satisfy user intent rank better than pages that frustrate users, and broken links are a reliable source of frustration.

The trust damage is harder to measure but equally real. Users who hit multiple broken links on your site will question whether your content is current and reliable. For SaaS products and businesses that depend on perceived authority, this credibility erosion can affect conversions long after the broken link is fixed.

4. Crawlability Issues

Broken internal links create dead ends in your site structure. Search engines discover new content by following links from pages they already know about. When a link in the middle of a content pathway is broken, everything beyond that link becomes harder to discover.

This can lead to orphaned pages where content exists on your site but isn't reachable through any working link path from your homepage. Search engines may eventually find these pages through other means (XML sitemaps, for example), but they'll crawl them less frequently and may assign them lower priority than well-connected pages.

Your site's internal linking structure is essentially a map that tells search engines what content you have and how it relates together. Broken links tear holes in that map.

Internal vs External Broken Links: Which Matter More?

Internal Broken Links (Higher Impact)

Internal broken links are the ones you should worry about most because you have complete control over them and they have the greatest impact on your site's SEO health.

Every internal broken link represents a direct failure in your site structure. It means PageRank is being wasted, users are hitting dead ends on your own site, and search engines are getting confused about your content architecture. Internal broken links should be fixed immediately when discovered.

Common causes include pages you deleted without setting up redirects, URL structure changes during a site redesign, typos in link URLs that were never caught, and CMS changes that altered the slug or permalink of a page.

External Broken Links (Lower SEO Impact)

External broken links happen when sites you link to change their URLs, remove content, or go offline entirely. You can't prevent this, and search engines understand that external links break through no fault of your own.

The direct SEO impact of external broken links is minimal. Google won't lower your rankings because a site you linked to disappeared. However, external broken links do hurt user experience, make your content appear outdated, and reduce the credibility of your page as a resource. If you're linking to resources as evidence or references, and those links are dead, it weakens the perceived quality of your content.

Update or remove external broken links during regular site audits, but don't treat them with the same urgency as internal broken links.

When Broken Links Become Critical

Not all broken links carry equal weight. Certain scenarios demand immediate attention.

Broken links on high-traffic pages affect the most users and send the strongest negative signals to search engines. If your homepage or top landing pages have broken links, fixing them should be your top priority.

Broken links in navigation or footer elements appear on every page of your site. A single broken link in your main nav effectively creates a broken link on every page, multiplying its negative impact across your entire site.

Links to conversion pages like pricing, signup, or checkout pages have direct revenue impact. A broken link preventing users from reaching your pricing page doesn't just hurt SEO; it costs you money.

Large sites with crawl budget constraints feel the impact of broken links more acutely than small sites. If your site has thousands of pages and hundreds of broken links, the cumulative effect on crawl efficiency becomes significant.

How to Find Broken Links on Your Website

Free Methods

Google Search Console's Pages report (formerly Coverage) shows pages that returned 404 errors when Googlebot tried to crawl them. This data comes directly from Google and shows what the search engine actually encountered, making it highly reliable. The limitation is that it only shows pages Google attempted to crawl, which may not include all your internal broken links.

Browser extensions like Check My Links for Chrome let you check individual pages manually. This works for spot-checking important pages but doesn't scale for comprehensive audits.

Professional Tools

SecurityBot's Broken Link Checker crawls up to 2,000 pages per scan and runs automated weekly crawls to catch new broken links before they accumulate. Results show the exact page where each broken link appears, the broken URL, and the HTTP status code, making it straightforward to prioritize and fix issues. You can also export results to CSV for tracking fixes over time.

Standalone SEO tools like Screaming Frog and Ahrefs also detect broken links as part of their site audit features, though they tend to be more expensive and complex than dedicated broken link checkers.

How to Fix Broken Links

1. 301 Redirect (Best for Pages with Backlinks)

When a page has been moved or replaced, a 301 redirect tells search engines and users that the content now lives at a different URL. This preserves any link equity that external backlinks were passing to the original URL.

# Nginx
location = /old-page {
    return 301 /new-page;
}

# Apache .htaccess
Redirect 301 /old-page /new-page

Always redirect to the most relevant replacement page. Redirecting everything to your homepage is considered poor practice and search engines may treat it as a soft 404.

2. Update the Link (Best for Internal Links)

When the destination page still exists at a different URL, simply update the link to point to the correct location. This is cleaner than adding a redirect and avoids creating unnecessary redirect chains.

Check your CMS, blog posts, and templates for instances of the old URL and update them all at once.

3. Remove the Link (Last Resort)

When an external site has permanently disappeared and no suitable replacement exists, removing the link is appropriate. Rewrite the surrounding text if necessary so the content still reads naturally without the link.

How Often Should You Check for Broken Links?

Weekly automated scans are the recommended frequency for most sites. This catches new broken links quickly, before they accumulate and before search engines have time to re-crawl the broken pages multiple times.

You should also run manual scans after major content updates, after site migrations or URL structure changes, after deploying code that might affect routing, and after removing or consolidating pages.

Monthly manual audits of your most important pages (homepage, key landing pages, top blog posts) provide an additional safety net. SecurityBot handles the weekly automated scans and lets you trigger on-demand scans anytime from your dashboard.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Google penalize sites for broken links?

Google does not apply a direct manual penalty for broken links. However, the indirect effects (wasted crawl budget, lost link equity, poor user signals, and reduced crawlability) all contribute to lower rankings over time. The distinction between a "penalty" and a "ranking disadvantage" is academic if the result is less organic traffic.

How many broken links is too many?

There's no magic threshold. A handful of broken links on a large site is normal and unlikely to cause measurable SEO damage. The concern starts when broken links are on important pages, when they represent a significant percentage of your total links, or when they've been accumulating for months without being addressed. Focus on fixing links on your highest-traffic and highest-value pages first.

Do broken external links hurt my SEO?

Minimal direct impact, but they hurt user experience and make your content appear outdated. If users are consistently encountering dead external links, it reduces the perceived quality of your content, which can indirectly affect engagement metrics. Clean up external broken links during regular audits, but prioritize internal broken links for SEO purposes.

Should I use 301 or 302 redirects for broken links?

Use 301 redirects for permanently moved or deleted content. A 301 tells search engines the change is permanent and passes link equity to the destination URL. Never use 302 (temporary) redirects for content that has been permanently moved or deleted. A 302 tells search engines to keep checking the original URL, which prevents equity from transferring and wastes crawl budget.

Start monitoring your site for broken links automatically with SecurityBot's Broken Link Checker. Crawl up to 2,000 pages weekly and catch 404 errors before they hurt your SEO. Start Free Trial.

Last updated: February 2026 | Written by Jason Gilmore, Founder of SecurityBot