How to Find and Fix Broken Links on Your Website

Broken links send users to dead pages and waste your crawl budget. Google sees them as a sign of poor site maintenance. Here's how to find and fix them fast.

How Broken Links Hurt Your SEO

• •Lost link equity — External links pointing to 404 pages waste valuable PageRank
• •Poor user experience — Users hitting dead pages leave immediately (high bounce rate)
• •Wasted crawl budget — Googlebot spends time crawling pages that don't exist
• •Lower trust signals — Too many broken links make your site look abandoned

Finding Broken Links

Option 1: Run a Site Audit

The fastest way to find all broken links is to crawl your entire site. SEOBolt's site audit checks every internal and external link:

1. Add your domain as a project
2. Click "Start Crawl"
3. Review the "Broken Links" section in results

The crawler follows every link on every page and reports:

• •404 pages — Pages that don't exist
• •Redirect chains — Links that redirect 2+ times
• •Orphan pages — Pages with no internal links pointing to them
• •Mixed content — HTTP links on HTTPS pages

Option 2: Check Google Search Console

Go to GSC → Pages → look for "Not found (404)" status. This shows pages Google tried to crawl but couldn't find.

Fixing Broken Links

Internal broken links

1. Update the link to point to the correct URL
2. If the page was moved, add a 301 redirect
3. If the page was deleted, remove the link entirely

External broken links pointing to your site

1. Set up 301 redirects from the old URL to the most relevant current page
2. Use your .htaccess, nginx config, or Next.js redirects

Redirect chains

Replace multi-hop redirects with a single redirect to the final destination:

# Bad: A → B → C
# Good: A → C

In Next.js, add redirects in your next.config.ts:

async redirects() {
  return [
    { source: '/old-page', destination: '/new-page', permanent: true },
  ];
}

Prevention

• •Run automated crawls weekly to catch new broken links
• •Set up monitoring alerts for 404 spikes
• •Always add redirects when renaming or moving pages
• •Check external links periodically — third-party sites change too