What Are Broken Links and Why They Hurt Your Website

A broken link is a URL on your page that does not resolve to a useful destination. The visitor clicks. The server answers 404, 410, 5xx, or nothing. Sometimes the click works but lands on a soft-404 — a “page” that is really an error wearing a 200.

Internal broken links point at your missing URLs. External ones point at someone else’s. Both waste a click. Internal ones also leak crawl budget and equity into a dead end you control.

What “broken” usually means

• 404 / 410 — gone. 410 is the honest “we removed this.”
• 5xx — the destination is sick today. Recheck before you rewrite the href.
• Timeout / DNS — the host is not answering from the browser that ran the check.
• Redirect chains — not a 404, still a tax. See redirect chains.
• Broken images — the same HTTP story for src / data-src. See broken images.

A link can also be wrong while green: 200 on a parked domain, a search homepage, or a login wall. Status codes are a filter, not a verdict. Look at the final URL.

Why they hurt

Users bounce. Assistive tech announces an error. You promised a resource and delivered a shrug.

On SEO, Google has been consistent: a handful of 404s is normal; a site that is 404s is a quality problem. Equity that hits a dead internal URL stops. External citations you forgot to update rot in public. There is a longer version in do broken links affect SEO.

What to do

1. Find them on the live page or with a whole-site scan.
2. Decide: restore the content, 301 to the successor, or delete the link.
3. Do not 302 a permanent move. Do not 200 an error template.

The Chrome extension Advanced Broken Links Search checks links and images in the tab you already have open, highlights the element, and exports CSV. Today it is free to use. That is the pitch.