Broken links

A broken link is a link to a page that no longer exists. Click one and you land on an error page (a 404 or 410). Broken links are also called dead links. Google does not like them and neither do your visitors, so they hurt your page.

Broken links are bad for your page

Picture this: you are reading a good story, you click a link that looks interesting, and you end up on a nice (or ugly) error page. That is annoying.
Google knows you find it annoying. Both Google and your visitors dislike pages that are not maintained, and they see broken links as a sign of poor quality.
That is why Google shows pages with many broken links less prominently in its search results. Quality matters a lot to Google, and it prefers to show the best pages it can find.

Hidden broken links

Some webmasters try to be clever and redirect pages that no longer exist to the homepage or another page, without returning a 404 (not found) status code. Google picks up on this quickly and calls these soft 404 pages. Avoid them too: remove or fix the internal links that no longer work.

Finding broken links

There are plenty of tools that find broken links, and we recommend checking your site for them regularly. Checking by hand is close to impossible, but for a computer it is easy. A crawler goes through your pages, and after a while you get a clean report listing every broken link.
Use that report to replace each broken link with a link to a page that does exist.