How to Find and Fix Broken Links (to Reclaim Valuable “Link Juice”)

Doing this will almost certainly have a positive impact on your rankings.

But it’s important to note that broken links and backlinks are two entirely different problems.

As such, I've divided this post into two sections:

Both of these fixes will help to reclaim so-called “link juice” across your site and improve user experience.

Let’s rock!

Broken links are those on your site that point to non-existent resources—these can be either internal (i.e., to other pages on your domain) or external (i.e., to pages on other domains.)

This is what a broken internal link looks like:

(It goes from one page on ahrefs.com to another—yet the page it points to doesn’t exist.)

...And this is what a broken external link looks like:

(It goes from a page on ahrefs.com to a non-existent page on another domain.)

Here are the only two ways that broken (dead) links can end up on your website:

Some people say that broken outgoing links (both internal and external) effectively waste “link juice”—this is due to the way Google’s PageRank algorithm works.

Some people also say that they hinder your websites crawlability.

(For more information on the issue of “do 404’s hurt my site?”, check out this article from Google.)

But technicalities aside, one thing is for sure: broken outgoing links (both internal and external) lead to a poor user experience.

You should, therefore, make every effort to fix them—it's easy, I promise!

For small websites, you can use Site Explorer to find all broken external links.

(It will pick up most, if not all, of the broken external links for smaller websites.)Site Explorer -> yourdomain.com -> Outgoing links -> Broken links.

But for larger websites, it’s better to use Site Audit; this will perform a live crawl of your website and thus, will ensure that you don’t miss any broken links.

To see broken external links (with Site Audit): Site Audit -> Project -> External Pages -> HTTP status codes -> 4XX.

But what about broken internal links? (e.g., yourdomain.com/page -> yourdomain.com/broken-page)

You will need Site Audit for this, too.

To see broken internal links (with Site Audit): Site Audit -> Project -> Internal Pages -> HTTP status codes -> 4XX.

In all honesty, this is quite an easy task—it’s just super-boring!

Here are the two possible fixes:

As I said, this is a pretty mundane task, so it may be worth hiring a VA to do this for you.

They are ten a penny on UpWork.

(Seriously, this beats doing it yourself!)

Broken backlinks are broken inbound links from other websites to your site.

This is what a broken backlink looks like:

(It goes from a page on urlprofiler.com to a page on ahrefs.com—i.e., our website.)

Because the page on our site no longer exists, it returns a 404 error.

Here are the two most common reasons for broken (dead) backlinks to your website:

Regardless of why they occur, broken backlinks are bad because they effectively waste “link juice."

It just sort of evaporates—or perhaps, spills—when it hits the 404.

But I know what you might be thinking…

NOPE.

Google has said that they don’t have any kind of authority score metric based on the overall backlink profile of a given domain. Therefore, these links (as they are) provide no benefit for you.

Here’s how to find and fix broken backlinks:

For this, I'll use Ahrefs' Broken Link Checker.

Let me show you some examples using one of my favorite websites, zenhabits.net.

Site Explorer -> yourdomain.com -> Pages -> Best by Links -> add a “404 not found” HTTP response filter.

This report lets you quickly sort all the URLs that return a 404 code on your site by their URL Rating (UR), number of backlinks, or ref. domains count.

By default, these links are ordered by URL Rating (UR).

Personally, I prefer sorting by the number of linking domains (i.e., RDs)—this way, we’re starting with the URLs that have the most broken links pointing to them.

Do that for zenhabits.com, and you’ll see that one of the broken pages has 80 referring domains!

(That’s a lot of wasted “link juice!”)

It goes without saying that you have no control over the links outside your website.

Or do you? ;)

Here are five fixes for broken backlinks:

But which solution should you use?

Well, I recommend going through these in the order that they’re listed.

By that, I mean that if option #1 (i.e., reaching out and requesting a fix) isn’t appropriate, move on to option #2, then #3, and so forth.

Make sense?

Let’s use this broken page from zenhabits.com example to illustrate this process:

Looking at the URL, it’s clear that there are no formatting issues (option #1). So there’s no need to reach out to anyone as the mistake is on our end, not theirs.

So let’s move on, and try to figure out what this page was before it was moved/removed.

In this instance, we can get a rough sense of what this page was about by looking at the URL. But it doesn’t give us the full picture.

So let’s use the Wayback Machine to see an archived copy of this page.

It looks like the article was about the “beginner’s mind” attitude to life.

Now that we know what the page was, the first step is to check whether the page was deleted or moved.

To do this, search in Google for: site:yourdomain.com + "title of the page"

If this search finds the broken page (at a different URL), then you can simply redirect the old, dead page to the new URL using a 301 redirect.

(Check out this guide from Yoast for more information on how to do that.)

As announced by Gary Illyes from Google, 301 redirects do pass PageRank.

But if no results are found (as is the case here), then chances are that page was deleted.

At this point, if you simply wanted to replace or recreate the page, you could—this would fix all broken links as the URL would no longer lead to a missing page.

However, nine times out of ten, you will have deleted the page for a reason, so you probably won’t want to do this.

Thus, the next step is to check to see if you have any similar content on the site, then redirect.

Here’s a Google search for that: site:"yourdomain.com" + overall topic of the page

Bingo!

If I managed this website, I could set up a 301 redirect from the old, broken page to point the other 80 referring domains to the live page.

You can do that for nearly every broken backlink on your site. Just keep two important things in mind:

But what if there is nothing relevant to which you can redirect the broken page? What then?

To be honest, sometimes it’s perfectly fine to ignore the broken backlink; just make sure it shows an informative 404 page. And never use “soft” 404s.

Here’s an extract from the Google Webmaster Central Blog that explains why:

Broken links and backlinks not only waste “link equity,” but also contribute to a poor user experience. That's why you should make every effort to find and fix them.

But this isn’t a one-time task; detecting and fixing broken links and backlinks must be an ongoing process, as a part of your sites’ regular SEO Audits. Here's an SEO audit template you can use to do that.

(Don’t forget that you can schedule automated audits in Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool, which makes it easy to keep on top of broken links and backlinks!)

What’s your experience with fixing broken links and backlinks?

Let me know in the comments section below. :)