Domains, delivery and craft
What is Broken link?
A link whose destination no longer returns a working page. Internal broken links waste crawl budget and strand readers mid-journey; external ones decay on their own as other sites reorganise, which is why they need checking rather than fixing once.
Also called: dead link · link rot
Handling each kind
- Internal 404
- Your fault and your fix. Correct the link, or redirect if the target genuinely moved.
- Internal redirect chain
- Link directly to the destination rather than through a hop.
- External 404
- Find the new address, cite an archived copy, or remove the link and keep the reference as text.
- Inbound 404
- Someone links to a URL you deleted. Redirect it — that is free link equity.
Beware single-attempt checkers
A checker with no retry logic reports transient timeouts as broken links. This site’s link checker makes three attempts with backoff, because a single-attempt run once declared four perfectly healthy client sites dead — the tool was wrong, not the links.
Automate it or it stops
Manual link checking lasts about one month. A check in the build pipeline, or a monthly scheduled run with an alert, is the version that is still happening a year later.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. Technical SEO, in the order the problems actually block you covers this properly — 4 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.