Broken links: small errors that quietly compound

What breaks, and what it costs

Three flavors, three different costs:

• Broken internal links — your page links to your own URL that now 404s. Crawlers waste budget on dead ends, any link equity pointed at the dead URL evaporates, and users hit a wall inside your own site. Fully your fault, fully fixable.
• Broken external links — you link out to a page that has since died. No direct ranking penalty, but a page full of dead references reads as abandoned, to users and to quality raters alike. Embeds count too: a deleted YouTube video is a broken link wearing a player skin.
• Inbound links to your dead pages — other sites link to URLs you removed. That's donated authority bouncing off a 404. (This one's found from your 404 logs and Search Console rather than a crawl.)

Finding them all

Clicking around doesn't scale; you need a crawler that starts at your homepage, follows every internal link, and tests every target — including external ones. Two practical notes from building exactly this:

• Re-test external links on a schedule, not once. The web rots continuously — a link that worked in January dies in June. (PicoRank caches external results and re-probes over time so you get fresh findings without hammering anyone's server.)
• Don't trust status codes blindly. Some sites return 200 for their error pages ("soft 404s"), and some embeds fail visually while the URL still resolves. Good checks look at more than the number.

Triage: fix, redirect, or remove

1. Fix when the target still exists elsewhere — the URL changed, the content didn't. Update the href to the live location (and prefer the final URL, not a redirect hop).
2. Redirect when the dead URL is one of yours and has inbound links or traffic: 301 it to the closest living equivalent. Never redirect everything to the homepage — that's a soft 404 with extra steps.
3. Remove the link when the destination is gone for good and nothing replaces it. A plain sentence beats a link to nowhere.

Prioritize by visibility: broken links on your navigation, home page, and top-traffic pages first; the 2019 blog post's dead footnote last. And once you're clean, keep it that way — the check belongs in your routine, not in your annual panic.

Prevention beats archaeology

• When you delete or move a page, grep your own site for links to it — in the same change.
• Add redirects at move time, while you still remember what replaced what.
• Re-crawl on a schedule; a weekly audit turns link rot from a project into a chore.