Broken Links: the Small Website Problem with a Big SEO Impact

When did you last check that every link on your website actually goes somewhere?

It’s one of those maintenance tasks that rarely feels urgent, until a client messages to say they can’t find something on your website… *awkward*. Of course, nobody breaks links on purpose but there are lots of reasons they break without you realising – and they might be more damaging than you think.

Here’s my quick guide to what they are, why they matter and what to do about them (and a footnote about 404 pages, as I never like to miss an opportunity to have some fun!).

What Is a Broken Link?

A broken link – sometimes called a dead link or a 404 error – is a hyperlink that no longer leads where is should: the page it pointed to has been deleted, the URL has changed or the external website it linked to has moved on.

Of course, there can be two types of broken link:

• Internal broken links: links within your own website that point to pages you’ve removed or renamed.

• External broken links: when you’ve linked from your site to another websites but that other site has moved or renamed something.

Both cause problems, just slightly different ones.

Why Broken Links Matter for Your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

Search engines – Google in particular – crawl (explore) your website regularly, following links from page to page to understand your content and decide how to rank it. When they hit a broken link, they can’t follow it. If your site has too many dead ends, Google may struggle to index your pages properly, which means content that should be appearing in search results simply isn’t.

There’s also the question of authority. If other websites link to a page on your site that no longer exists, that link, which should be passing credibility and ranking power to your site, is wasted. It leads nowhere, and you lose the benefit entirely.

Given how much effort goes into building a website that appears well in search results, allowing broken links to quietly undermine that work is, to put it plainly, a shame. If you’ve been working on improving your SEO (checking your Google Business Profile, building reviews, making sure your website content uses the right keywords) broken links can quietly cancel out some of that effort. They’re worth finding and fixing quickly as part of any website health check.

Why Broken Links Matter for Your Website Visitors

Of course, there’s a more human problem too: the experience of the person visiting your website. Imagine a potential client has found you through Google, they’re reading about your services, they click a link to find out more and… they hit a dead end! At best, they’ll feel mildly frustrated and press the ‘back’ key. At worst, they’ll leave your website entirely and go to a competitor whose website works properly.

First impressions really matter in any business and a website that doesn’t work is a surprisingly easy way to lose someone who was already interested. High bounce rates (the proportion of visitors who leave your site quickly) also send a negative signal to Google, which compounds the SEO problem.

For small businesses where every website visitor represents a potential client, this is not a small issue.

What Causes Broken Links?

Broken links aren’t usually the result of anything you’ve done wrong, they’re largely an inevitable consequence of websites evolving over time. Common causes include:

• Deleting or renaming a page on your website without updating the links that pointed to it

• Changing your website’s URL structure, common when moving platforms or redesigning a site

• Linking to an external website or resource that has since moved, been taken down, or changed its URL

• Typos in a URL when the link was originally added

The longer your website has been live and the more content you’ve added over time, the more likely it is that some links have quietly stopped working. (I once worked on the website of an educational establishment, the backend of which looked it was designed by Heath Robinson. Of course, it did have a clear structure – once upon a time – but it had evolved over many years to become the Frankenstein’s monster of websites. Finding and repairing broken links was a weekly habit…!)

How to Find Them

The good news is that you don’t need technical knowledge to find broken links on your website, there are free, online tools that do the work for you. There’s a good chance your website developer and/or web host will have some more technical and more detailed tools for identifying broken links but the three below are great for some ‘DIY’ diagnosis:

• Broken Link Checker (brokenlinkcheck.com) the simplest option, no login required. Simply paste in your URL, hit go and it crawls your site and returns a list of broken links with the page they appear on. No account needed, no software to install. Good for a quick one-off check.

• Ahrefs Broken Link Checker (ahrefs.com/broken-link-checker) this is a trimmed-down, free version of Ahrefs’ paid tool. It’s particularly good for checking broken inbound links – i.e. links from other websites pointing to pages on your site that no longer exist – which the other two don’t focus on. No download needed, though you do need to set up a free account to see your full results.

• Screaming Frog SEO Spider (screamingfrog.co.uk) more powerful than the others and the tool most SEO professionals use. The free version crawls up to 500 URLs and flags broken links, redirect chains and missing meta descriptions alongside them, so you get a broader SEO health check at the same time. Requires a desktop download (Windows, Mac, or Linux) but is pretty straightforward to use.

What to Do When You Find Them

Once you have a list of broken links, the fix is usually straightforward:

• For internal links either update the link to point to the correct page or, if the content has been removed permanently, delete the link.

• For external links check whether the linked page still exists at a different URL and update accordingly. If the resource has gone entirely, remove the link or find a better alternative to link to.

• For pages that others link to from their websites set up a redirect from the old URL to the most relevant current page (or ask your web developer to), so that any incoming links still lead somewhere useful rather than to a 404 error.

If your list is long, prioritise the pages that get the most traffic or that contain your most important content. A methodical approach works better than trying to fix everything at once.

How Often Should You Check For Broken Links?

For most small business websites, a check every three to six months is sensible. It’s also worth running a check any time you make significant changes to your website; restructuring pages, redesigning the site or removing old content are the moments when broken links most commonly appear. It takes less than half an hour and is one of those quiet maintenance tasks that pays dividends in both user experience and search visibility over time. (A productive Friday afternoon task if you’re not in the headspace for anything else!)

For most of us, website maintenance isn’t the most exciting part of marketing but it’s the foundation that everything else is built on – and it can be very satisfying, fixing stuff! A fast, well-maintained website with no broken links, clear content and good SEO basics gives every other marketing activity a much better chance of working. (If you’d like a fresh pair of eyes on your website’s health, get in touch.)

A footnote about 404 pages

A ‘404’ page is that error message you get if the page you’re looking for isn’t found, often shown as the result of a broken link. You’ve probably seen them on other people’s websites; you’ve bookmarked a page which has now moved or you’ve mis-typed a URL, for example, and ended up with ‘Sorry, the page you’re looking for no longer exists’.

Your own website should probably have a 404 page of its own, however rarely it gets used. It’s an opportunity to keep users on your website and direct them somewhere more useful (not to mention reducing your bounce rate and helping your SEO). It’s also a fantastic opportunity to show a bit of personality or show off your brand identity if you want to – making sure anyone who sees the page knows that it’s not your whole website that’s broken.

My favourite (ever!) 404 page was from Lego – clearly having fun with that! – but I also love Mailchimp’s simple humour too. Both give clear links to either retrace your steps or search on, encouraging visitors not to leave the site entirely.