Broken Link
A broken link points to a URL that no longer resolves, usually returning a 404 or 410 status code. They appear when pages are deleted or renamed without redirects, and they waste crawl budget while sending real visitors to dead ends.
Why it matters for your rankings
Every broken internal link is authority poured away. Link equity flows into a URL that returns nothing, and any external site pointing at that URL is now donating value to an error page instead of to your content.
The user cost is more immediate. Someone researching a purchase who hits a 404 rarely searches your site for the moved page. They return to Google and click a competitor. At scale, broken links also signal neglect. Google's quality guidelines treat unmaintained sites as lower quality, and a crawler spending its budget on dead URLs has less left for the pages you want indexed. The good news is that this is among the cheapest problems in SEO to fix, and fixing it often recovers rankings quickly.
How to check it on your site
Crawl for internal 404s
Run Screaming Frog, open the Response Codes tab and filter to Client Error 4xx. Use 'Inlinks' to find which pages contain each broken link.
Find broken pages with backlinks
In Ahrefs open Best by Links and filter for 404 status. These URLs have external links pointing at nothing and are the highest-value fixes.
Redirect rather than delete
Point each dead URL at the closest relevant live page with a 301. Redirecting everything to the homepage is treated as a soft 404.
Recheck after any migration
Re-crawl within 48 hours of a site change. Migrations are where most broken links are created.