Three kinds of broken link, three different jobs
Almost every article on this topic mashes the three together and recommends one fix. They aren't the same problem, they don't carry the same value, and only one is worth dropping other work for.
| Type | What it is | What it costs | The fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| Internal | Your page links to your own URL that now 404s. | Dead ends for users, wasted crawl, signals sent nowhere. | Edit the link to point at the live URL. |
| Outbound | Your page links to someone else's URL that has died. | A poor reading experience. Minor. | Update it, or unlink the text. |
| Inbound (broken backlinks) | Another site links to a URL of yours that no longer exists. | Authority you already earned, landing on a 404. | 301 the dead URL to the closest live equivalent. |
Finding them without paying for a tool
You can cover all three types free, and it takes an afternoon.
- Internal: Screaming Frog's free tier crawls 500 URLs — filter by Client Error (4xx), then use the Inlinks panel to see which pages contain each broken link. That panel turns a list of 404s into a to-do list.
- Internal, larger sites: Ahrefs Webmaster Tools gives free Site Audit access on a verified domain. Bing Webmaster Tools also runs a free scan.
- Inbound: cross-reference Search Console → Indexing → Pages → "Not found (404)" against the Links report's top linked pages. Anything on both lists is a dead page with backlinks.
- Outbound: a crawler flags external 4xx and 5xx. Recheck after a week before acting — outages and bot-blocking produce plenty of false positives.
Fix in order of value, not in order of the report
A broken-link report sorts by URL. That's the wrong order to work in, and it's how people spend a day fixing links in posts nobody reads. Work down this list instead, and stop when the value runs out.
- Dead URLs with backlinks. Sort by referring domains and redirect each to its closest live equivalent. The only step that recovers something you can't get any other way.
- Broken links on pages that get traffic. A 404 in the navigation or on a top landing page is a conversion problem before it's an SEO problem.
- Broken links inside your money pages. Product, service and pricing pages are where you want internal link equity flowing, and a dead link is a leak.
- Everything else, in bulk. Old posts, archives, footer links to a page you retired. Batch it, do it once, move on.
- Outbound links, last. Fix the ones on pages that still get read; the rest can wait for a content refresh.
Reclaiming dead backlinks properly
This is the part worth doing carefully, because the wrong redirect gets you nothing.
Google's stated behaviour is that a redirect to an irrelevant page is treated as a soft 404 — the signals don't transfer. A bulk rule sending every dead URL to / looks tidy in the config file and achieves roughly what a 404 would have. Map each URL to its closest genuine equivalent: a discontinued product to its replacement, a retired post to the article that supersedes it.
Where nothing equivalent exists, two honest options. Recreate the page if the link is valuable enough — an old resource with twenty referring domains often is. Otherwise return a 410, which tells Google the removal was deliberate and drops the URL faster than a 404.
One that gets forgotten: the redirect has to stay. Deleting it two years later during a server move re-breaks every backlink pointing at it, which is how sites lose authority in a replatform without touching the content.
How often to re-check
Broken links are entropy, not an event. They accumulate every time someone deletes a product, renames a page or retires a campaign.
Monthly for ecommerce with a moving catalogue, quarterly for a content site, annually for a brochure site — and always in the fortnight after a migration.
Two habits cut the workload more than any tool: never delete a URL without deciding its redirect in the same commit, and keep the redirect map in version control, not in a plugin's database.