A broken link is one that leads to a page the server can no longer return — most often a
404 Not Found.
Every site accumulates them over time as pages are renamed, moved or deleted, and they quietly hurt both
visitors and search engines.
Why they matter
- Wasted crawl budget — crawlers spend time requesting dead URLs instead of your real pages.
- Lost link value — a link pointing at a 404 passes its value nowhere.
- Frustrated visitors — dead ends erode trust and send people back to the search results.
Status codes worth knowing
- 200 — OK. The page loaded; it belongs in your sitemap.
- 301 / 302 — a redirect. List the destination URL in your sitemap, not the redirecting one.
- 404 / 410 — gone. Fix the link, or redirect the old URL to a relevant replacement.
- 5xx — a server error. Often temporary, but persistent 5xxs need investigating.
How a crawl finds them
A crawler follows every link on each page and records the HTTP status it gets back. Anything that is not a
healthy 200
(or a clean redirect) is flagged so you can fix it. Keeping broken links out of your sitemap matters too — a
sitemap full of 404s tells search engines your data is stale.
Built into the crawl
With an account, every crawl produces a broken-links report alongside your sitemap, so you can spot dead URLs the moment they appear instead of hearing about them from a frustrated visitor.
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