Think about the last time you clicked a link and landed on a 404 page. That "Page Not Found" screen. The cute illustration of a dog or a construction worker or whatever.
You probably felt a tiny flicker of irritation and closed the tab. You didn't write a review. You didn't email the site owner. You just... left.
Google is doing the exact same thing when it crawls your site, and the consequences are a lot more expensive than a single annoyed visitor.
Let me walk you through what's really happening, because I think most small-business owners genuinely don't know this.
What a broken link tells Google
When Googlebot crawls your site and follows an internal link, it's counting that link as a "vote" — a signal that the page being linked to is important. This is the foundation of how Google has ranked pages since 1998. Links are votes.
Now, what happens when that link leads to a 404?
Three things, all bad:
1. The vote is lost. The ranking power that would've flowed from the linking page to the linked page is gone. Not redirected. Not partially transferred. Gone.
2. The crawl budget is wasted. Google has a finite amount of time it's willing to spend crawling your site. Every 404 is a wasted request. On a small site that's fine, but on a 500-page site with 30 broken links, that's 30 pages Google's NOT crawling because it's chasing dead ends.
3. The "site quality" signal tanks. Google doesn't publish an exact formula, but broken internal links are widely understood to be a quality signal. A site with lots of broken links reads as "unmaintained." Unmaintained sites get crawled less often. They rank lower.
And — I'll come back to this in a minute — there's a fourth thing that's even quieter and even more damaging. But first.
How broken links happen without anyone doing anything wrong
You probably didn't go into your site and break links on purpose. Here's how they show up anyway:
You deleted a blog post. Three years ago you wrote "Our Top 10 Tips for Summer 2022" and last month you deleted it because it was embarrassing. Every page that linked to it is now a broken link.
You renamed a URL. You changed /services/plumbing to /plumbing-services because it reads better. Every internal link pointing at the old URL is now broken. So is every external link anyone ever posted on Facebook, Reddit, or their blog.
You migrated your site. New platform, new URL structure, old 301 redirects didn't all get carried over.
A plugin got confused. Some SEO plugins auto-generate archive pages that later get disabled. Some e-commerce plugins create product variants with their own URLs that get deleted when the product is updated. Links inside your site can reference URLs that the plugin itself deleted.
A third-party resource moved. You linked to a tool, a study, a news article on another site. That site restructured. Your link, via no fault of your own, now 404s.
None of these involve you doing anything wrong. All of them are happening on your site right now, probably.
The fourth thing (that's quieter than the others)
Here's the one people miss.
When a page on your site has a broken link, Google doesn't just penalize the target. It slightly distrusts the linking page.
Think about it from Google's perspective. You're an algorithm trying to rate the quality of pages. You see a page that links to five sources. Four of those sources exist. One is a 404. What does that suggest?
The author didn't check their own references. The page is stale. Nobody's maintained it in a while.
None of this is a death sentence. But it adds up. A site where every page has a fresh, clean set of internal links reads as "actively cared for." A site where half the pages have at least one broken link reads as "abandoned."
Abandoned sites don't rank.
External broken links vs. internal broken links
Worth separating these, because they're different problems with different fixes:
Internal broken links (links from one page on your site to another page on your site): These are fully your problem and fully in your control. Every one of them can be fixed.
External broken links (links from your site to someone else's): These are partially your problem. You can't control whether another site disappears, but you can control whether your site keeps pointing at the corpse. Replace with current links when you find them broken, or remove the link entirely if there's no equivalent source.
For SEO impact, internal broken links are way worse. Fix those first.
How to find all the broken links on your site
Option 1: Google Search Console (free but limited)
Log into Search Console. Go to Pages → "Not found (404)." This shows you URLs Google tried to crawl on your site that returned 404s, plus which page linked to each one. It's incomplete — it only shows what Google has tried recently — but it's free and a good start.
Option 2: A link-check plugin (WordPress only)
Broken Link Checker plugins exist for WordPress. They work, but many of them eat a surprising amount of server resources running in the background. Use them for a scan, then deactivate.
Option 3: Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs, powerful, technical)
Desktop SEO crawler. Crawls your whole site and gives you a list of every broken link, where it's located, and where it's supposed to go. Free for sites under 500 URLs. The learning curve is real — it looks like a 2003 Excel sheet — but it's what actual SEO agencies use.
Option 4: Run the scan at abbyseo.com (fast, no install)
You paste a URL. We crawl a sample of your internal links and report back the broken ones in plain English. Not as thorough as Screaming Frog on a paid plan, but thorough enough to catch the issues sinking a small site. (Here's what the scanner actually does in those 45 seconds if you're curious.)
How to fix broken links without breaking other things
The wrong way: delete the broken link. This sometimes makes sense. Often it doesn't. If the target page existed at some point and other sites or pages are still linking to it, you're better off setting up a redirect.
The right way, in priority order:
1. If the old page just moved: Set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. In WordPress this is one line in a plugin like Redirection. On an Apache server it's one line in .htaccess. Google follows the redirect, updates its index, and passes 95%+ of the ranking power to the new URL.
2. If the old page is truly gone and there's a better alternative: Redirect to the closest-relevant page. Don't redirect everything to the homepage — Google treats that as a "soft 404" and doesn't transfer much ranking power. Redirect each gone page to its most relevant living page.
3. If the old page is truly gone and there's no alternative: Let it 404, and update every internal link pointing at it. The 404 is fine as long as there aren't many of them and they aren't linked from many places.
4. Never use a 302 for permanent moves. 302 means "temporary." 301 means "permanent." Permanent moves always get the 301.
A quick reality check
I'm not suggesting broken links are the biggest SEO problem your site has. They're usually not the biggest. Title tags and internal duplication usually are.
But broken links are one of those issues that compounds silently. One broken link doesn't matter. Eighty broken links absolutely do. And the only way to know which bucket you're in is to actually look.
Or, the five-minute version
Run the scan at abbyseo.com. Free, no signup. In under a minute you'll get a list of broken internal links on your homepage and the pages linked from it. If the list is empty, beautiful — you can skip this whole concern. If it's long, now you know, and the $8.99 remediation guide walks you through which broken links to fix first, which redirect type to use, and how to set them up in your specific setup (WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, static HTML, etc.).
Broken links are the slow leak in the tire. You can drive on them for a while. Eventually you won't be going anywhere.