Broken Link

A broken link is a hyperlink whose destination returns an error status — most commonly a 404 Not Found, but also 500-series server errors, DNS failures, or unreachable hostnames. Broken links come in two flavours that matter differently for SEO.

Inbound broken links are external sites linking to URLs on your site that no longer exist. These are valuable: another publisher has already decided to link to your domain, and you have an opportunity to recover that Link Equity by setting up a 301 redirect from the dead URL to the closest live equivalent. Most operators are surprised by how many of these they have — historical 404s accumulate quietly after CMS migrations, content prunes, and URL restructures.

Outbound broken links are links on your own site pointing to destinations that no longer exist. These hurt user experience and can erode trust signals. They are also a E-E-A-T sign of low maintenance — Google has explicitly mentioned content freshness and accuracy in its quality guidelines. A site with hundreds of dead outbound links looks neglected.

Broken inbound links also enable a specific Link Building tactic: broken-link reclamation. The workflow: identify pages on authoritative sites in your niche that link to 404s; create content that closely matches the dead destination's topic; email the publisher pointing out the broken link and suggesting your replacement. Conversion rates on this outreach are higher than cold pitching because you are doing the publisher a favour.

For ongoing health, audit inbound 404s monthly and resolve them with 301 redirects where there is a logical destination. For URLs with no logical destination, a clean 410 Gone (or 404) is acceptable — do not chain redirects to unrelated pages just to avoid a 404, as that pattern is itself penalised under Google's "soft 404" classification.

Outbound broken links should be fixed at the point of discovery, either by updating the link or removing it. Crawl your site monthly with any standard SEO crawler to surface them.