Broken Links and 404 Errors: When They Hurt SEO and How to Fix Them

Every site accumulates broken links: a renamed page, a deleted feature, a typo in the footer. The good news is that 404 errors are a normal part of the web. The bad news is that broken internal links still cost you visitors and crawl attention. Here is how to think about them.

Do 404 errors hurt rankings?

Google has said repeatedly that 404s for pages that genuinely don't exist are expected, and that they don't cause the rest of your site to rank worse. A URL that returns 404 will eventually drop out of the index, which is what you want for a page that is gone.

Where 404s do cost you:

• Visitors hit a dead end from your own navigation, docs or blog — and often leave.
• Lost link value when other sites link to a URL you deleted without a redirect.
• Wasted crawling on large sites, where crawlers keep following dead internal links.

Watch out for soft 404s

A soft 404 is a "page not found" message served with a 200 OK status. Search engines can't reliably tell it apart from a real page, so it may get indexed or flagged in Search Console. Your error page should return an actual 404 status (or 410 for content removed on purpose).

curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" https://example.com/this-page-does-not-exist

If that prints 200, fix your server or framework's not-found handling.

How to fix broken links

1. Find them. Crawl your site — the BriefCraft checker samples internal links on every audit — and check Search Console's Pages report for "Not found (404)".
2. Fix the link at the source when the target simply moved: update the URL in your nav, footer or content.
3. Add a 301 redirect when a page was replaced, pointing to the most relevant equivalent page — not blanket redirects to the homepage.
4. Leave a 404 (or 410) when content is gone for good and has no equivalent.
5. Re-check after deploys. Most broken internal links are introduced by renames during a release.

What about broken outbound links?

Links from your site to other sites break too. They don't directly hurt rankings, but they make content feel stale. Fix or remove them when you update a post.