Broken link: A link whose destination no longer loads — usually a 404 Not Found or 410 Gone, sometimes a server error. Readers hit a dead end and crawlers waste a visit.
Where they come from
On WordPress, most broken internal links are self-inflicted: a slug changed, a post merged or deleted, a category renamed, a site moved. A travel blog that tidies “/lisbon-3-days/” into “/lisbon-itinerary/” without a redirect breaks every link that used the old address, in its own posts and on other sites.
A 404 on its own is not a penalty; deleted pages are a normal part of the web. The cost is practical: readers hit a dead end, and whatever the page had built up through its links stops there.
How to find them
- Crawl the site and filter internal links that return a 4xx or 5xx status.
- The Redirection plugin logs 404s that visitors actually hit, which tells you which broken addresses matter most.
- Search Console’s Page indexing report lists URLs returning 404 that Google knows about, including ones linked from other sites.
How to fix them
For a link in your own content, edit it to point at the right live page. For an address that had traffic or backlinks, add a 301 redirect to the closest replacement — and then still update your own links, so they do not go through the redirect. Do not redirect every 404 to the home page: Google’s John Mueller has said that blanket redirects to the home page are seen as soft 404s, so they gain you nothing over a plain 404. See soft 404.
Broken links are check 4 in the internal link audit checklist, which puts them first because they are quick and unambiguous to fix.