Broken links: small problem, surprisingly large SEO impact
Why 404s hurt more than you think — and the 10-minute fix
“Every broken internal link is a dead end for both users and Google's crawler. They accumulate silently.”
When Google follows a link and gets a 404, two things happen:
1. The crawl path ends — Google can't discover anything beyond that broken link 2. Any PageRank that was flowing through that link is lost
On small sites this is a minor issue. On sites with hundreds of pages, broken internal links can quietly starve entire sections from Google's attention.
The three types of broken links:
Broken internal links — Links within your own site pointing to pages that no longer exist. Usually caused by deleting or renaming pages without updating links.
Broken external links — Links from your site to other sites that have moved or disappeared. These don't directly affect your rankings, but they hurt user experience and signal low quality.
Broken backlinks — External sites linking to pages on your site that no longer exist. This is lost PageRank — often significant. Fix by 301 redirecting the dead URL to the closest live equivalent.
How to find them: Run RankyPulse on your domain — broken links appear in the Technical Issues section. Or use Google Search Console → Coverage → Not Found (404) for a crawled list.
How to fix them: - Internal links: update the link to point to the correct URL - Deleted pages with backlinks: 301 redirect to the closest relevant live page - Don't redirect everything to the homepage — Google sees through this
Set a calendar reminder to run a broken link check monthly. Takes 10 minutes.