A broken link is exactly what it sounds like: a link on your website that doesn’t go anywhere. Click it, and instead of landing on a useful page, your visitor hits a dead end, usually a 404 error page that says something like “page not found.” Easy to miss if you don’t regularly check your site for technical SEO issues.
They’re more common than most people realise, and more damaging too.
How do links break? Usually it’s because something changed. A page got deleted, a URL was updated without a redirect being put in place, or an external site you were linking to took their content down. Over time, as websites evolve, broken links quietly accumulate.
Why does it matter for SEO? Links are how search engines crawl your site. When Google follows a link and hits a dead end, it can’t continue down that path. If you have a lot of broken internal links, parts of your site may not be getting crawled and indexed properly. That means pages that should be ranking might not even be in the game.
Why does it matter for users? Trust, mostly. Landing on a 404 page feels sloppy. It breaks the flow of what someone was trying to do, and it can knock their confidence in your site. In competitive industries, that moment of friction might be all it takes for someone to go back and try a competitor.
What about broken external links? These don’t hurt your SEO directly, but they’re worth tidying up. Linking out to broken pages looks careless and gives your visitors a poor experience.
How do you find them? Tools like Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, or Google Search Console will crawl your site and flag any broken links. From there, you can either update the link to point somewhere useful, remove it entirely, or, if the broken page is on your own site, put a redirect in place so visitors and search engines land somewhere relevant instead.
It’s a simple housekeeping job, but it’s one of those things that quietly makes a real difference.
Not sure how many broken links are lurking on your site? Pollinate Marketing’s free audit will find them for you.
