Broken Link

Definition

A broken link (also called a dead link or link rot) is a hyperlink that leads to a page that doesn\'t return a successful HTTP response. The most common cause is a 404 Not Found response — the page was deleted, moved without a redirect, or the URL was typed incorrectly in the linking page. Other broken link statuses: 410 Gone (page intentionally removed), 500 Internal Server Error (server-side failure), 403 Forbidden (access denied). **Internal broken links** — links within the same domain that return 4xx: these are crawl budget waste (Googlebot fetches the broken URL, fails, and must re-spend crawl budget elsewhere), user experience failures (users click and get an error page), and ranking signal leaks (link equity flows to the broken URL and is lost rather than reaching a live page). **External broken links** — links from your site to a different domain\'s URL that has gone dead: these harm user experience and are a signal of content maintenance quality, though their direct ranking impact is minor. **Incoming broken links** — links from other domains pointing to a URL on your site that has gone dead (the most valuable type to fix): restoring the page or adding a 301 redirect to a relevant live URL recovers the inbound link equity from those external sources. For broken incoming links, prioritise fixing those with the most referring domains — use a backlink tool (Ahrefs, Majestic) to find which deleted URLs have external links pointing to them, then create 301 redirects to the best remaining equivalent.

Why it matters for SEO

Broken internal links are a crawl inefficiency that compounds on large sites. A 10,000-page site with 5% broken internal links means 500 wasted crawl slots per crawl cycle — potentially leaving important new or updated pages undiscovered. Broken links from high-PageRank pages to deleted pages are a direct loss of link equity. For content-heavy sites, regular broken link audits (quarterly for most sites, monthly for sites with high content churn) are necessary maintenance. Fixing broken incoming links (via 301 redirects on your own deleted pages) can recover significant link equity from external sources.

How DeepSEOAnalysis checks this

The audit follows every internal link encountered during the crawl and records the HTTP status code. All 4xx and 5xx responses on internal links are flagged as broken links, with the source page and anchor text. External links are sampled (rate-limited HEAD requests) to check for dead external links. All broken links are grouped by source page and sorted by the authority of the source page — so the most link-equity-losing broken links surface first.

Useful tools and resources

• Free broken link audit