Broken links, such as 404 pages, these can negatively impact website user experience, result in less sales, and makes it harder for Googlebot to crawl and index the website.

 

Broken links on internal pages

There might be a broken link internally on your website, for example from a blog post to a product page, where the product is no longer for sale.

 

Crawl budgets

It’s a bit like finding a car parking space in a multi storey car park, it can take a lot of time and wasted petrol circling the car park to find a space, for say over 30 minutes.

That’s when instead, if it was possible, to direct you to say floor 3, and space 17, well you would know where you going, saving valuable time.

Googlebot can work in a similar way, it is wasting time my constantly trying to crawl pages which no longer exist, causing 404 errors, and part of your crawl budget to be wasted. Instead, if the errors were fixed, its possible instead to better use the crawl budget, so Googlebot can instead crawl say perhaps a new piece of content marketing, that it could index.

If the crawl budget is used up crawling hundreds of 404 pages, then it could take weeks, if not months, for Googlebot to find your new content marketing you have just added.

 

Link juice & link equity

Link juice, and link equity they are essentially the same description that’s used to describe the power that’s given from one domain to another.

So, what do we mean by this?

Well, let’s say a website, the BBC.co.uk writes an article, and provides a do-follow backlink to a start-up company, that’s creating AI programmes here in the U.K.

The AI company will benefit from the BBC.co.uk linking to it, and passing link equity to that domain.

Yet all backlinks are not created equal, some will enhance your SEO, by sending link equity.

Yet some backlinks, they are considered spam, by Google and other search engines, and will result in the business incurring a link penalty.

Google Search Console

If you log into your Google Search Console account, and click on pages, you will often pages not indexed and indexed.

Click on the Not Found tab

This will include a list of pages, which have broken links to your site.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a tool used by most seo agencies, it includes a free version, which can quickly tell you if there are any broken links.

You can also use Google Analytics to help you find broken links
Its also possible to set up a custom report, using GA4, to help tell you about broken internal links as they occur.

How to fix broken links

Determine why each link is broken.

Here are some of the options for fixing broken links?

Create a 301 redirect to a different working page, with relevant content marketing

Fix any typos

You can recreate a page for that link

This way you might be able to still get link juice that was passing to that page, to get it to be sent to recreated page with the same url.