Broken internal links occur when a link on your website points to a page that no longer exists (returning a “404 Not Found” error).

These are damaging for two reasons: they frustrate users who hit “dead ends,” and they waste Crawl Budget, preventing Googlebot from flowing through your site to index your valuable content.

Follow this workflow to identify and repair them.

1. Identify the Broken Links

You do not need to check every button manually. Use these tools to scan your site.

• Google Search Console (Free):
  • Go to Pages > Why pages aren’t indexed.
  • Look for the line: “Not found (404)”.
  • Click on a URL in the list, then click “Inspect URL”.
  • Critical Step: This tells you the missing page, but not where the broken link is. To find the source, you often need a crawler.
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider (Best for Pros):
  • This is free for websites with under 500 pages.
  • Download and run it on your URL.
  • Click the “Response Codes” tab and filter by “Client Error (4xx)”.
  • Click on a broken URL and look at the “Inlinks” tab at the bottom to see exactly which pages are linking to it.
    
    

2. Choose the Right Fix

Once you have found a broken link, you have three options. Do not default to the same fix for every link.

Method A: Update the Link (The Gold Standard) If Page A links to a broken Page B, but you have a working Page C:

• Go to Page A, edit the text, and change the hyperlink to point directly to Page C.
• This is better than a redirect because it saves the browser (and Google) from making an extra “hop.”
  
  

Method B: The 301 Redirect (If the page moved) If you deleted an old service page and replaced it with a new one:

• Set up a 301 Redirect from the old URL to the new URL.
• Use a plugin like Redirection (for WordPress) or your host’s control panel.
• Anyone clicking the old link is automatically sent to the new page.
  
  

Method C: Delete the Link (If the content is gone) If the link points to a blog post from 2015 that you deleted because it was irrelevant:

• Simply remove the hyperlink from the text.
  
  

3. Handling “Soft 404s”

Sometimes, a page is broken (blank), but the server says it is fine (returns a “200 OK” status). Google calls this a Soft 404.

• Ensure your custom “Page Not Found” page actually sends a 404 server code. If it sends a 200 code, Google may mistakenly index your error page as “content.”
  
  

Redirect vs. Replace

Is it better to redirect the old link or go into the content and update it manually?

“I’d always try to fix internal links… redirects for internal links still require visitors to go through the older version of a page first… Updating links… can therefore give a small but meaningful boost to the quality of the user experience.”

For External links (from other sites), you must use Redirects because you cannot edit their site. For Internal links (your site), you should Update the link manually where possible