What Are Broken Links and Why Do They Occur?

A broken link — also called a dead link or a 404 link — is a hyperlink that points to a URL that no longer exists or cannot be reached. When a visitor or a search engine crawler follows a broken link, they land on an error page instead of the intended destination.

Broken links occur for several common reasons. A page may have been deleted or renamed without a redirect being set up. An external website you linked to may have shut down. URL structures can change during a website migration, leaving old links pointing to non-existent addresses. Products in an e-commerce catalogue get discontinued, yet the links to those product pages remain scattered across the website.

Every active website accumulates broken links over time. The longer a site has been live, the more likely it is to have dead links hiding in older content.

How Broken Links Hurt Your SEO Performance

Search engines like Google use crawlers that systematically follow every link on your website. When Googlebot encounters broken links repeatedly during a crawl, it registers this as a signal of poor site quality and maintenance. While a handful of broken links will not tank your rankings overnight, a site with dozens or hundreds of dead links faces several SEO consequences.

Broken external links (links pointing to other websites) send PageRank into a dead end. Even though Google has said that PageRank is not "wasted" by broken links the way it once was, they still signal a lack of content quality maintenance to human reviewers during manual quality evaluations.

From a user experience standpoint, landing on a 404 page increases your bounce rate and reduces dwell time — both behavioral signals that can indirectly influence rankings.

Common HTTP Status Codes You Will Encounter

Understanding HTTP status codes helps you decide what action to take for each broken link found during a scan.

For SEO purposes, 404 and 410 errors are the most critical to fix because they represent permanently lost destinations with no fallback for crawlers or users.

Internal vs. External Broken Links — Which Matters More?

Both types of broken links deserve attention, but they carry different weight in an SEO audit.

Internal broken links are links within your own website that point to pages on the same domain. These are particularly damaging because they break the internal linking structure of your site — disrupting the flow of PageRank between your own pages and blocking crawlers from discovering your content hierarchy. A broken internal link on a high-traffic page can effectively orphan an important page from your crawl graph.

External broken links point to third-party websites. These are harder to control since external sites change independently of your actions. However, they still reflect on your content quality. A blog post from 2021 that references five external sources, three of which are now dead, looks outdated and unreliable to both readers and quality reviewers.

As a rule of thumb: prioritize fixing internal broken links first, then address external ones in the order of their page authority and traffic.

Real-World Example — Indian E-Commerce Blog (Mumbai)

A fashion dropshipping store based in Mumbai had been running a product recommendation blog for three years. During a routine SEO audit, the owner ran a broken link check on 15 of their most visited blog posts. The scan revealed 34 broken links — mostly pointing to discontinued supplier product pages and closed affiliate partner sites.

After fixing the internal broken links by setting up 301 redirects to replacement product pages, and removing or updating external links, the site saw a 12% improvement in crawl coverage within 45 days according to their Google Search Console coverage report. Indexed pages increased and organic impressions began recovering to their earlier levels.

This is a realistic outcome consistent with what many SEO practitioners report after conducting thorough link audits — not a guaranteed result, but a well-documented pattern in technical SEO case studies.

Step-by-Step: How to Fix Broken Links After Identifying Them

Once you have a list of broken links from your scan, follow this structured approach to address each one:

1. Identify the source page — Note which page on your site contains the broken link. This is the page you will need to edit.
2. Determine the link type — Is it an internal link (to your own domain) or an external link (to another website)?
3. For internal broken links: Either set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new URL if the content still exists, or update the hyperlink directly in your page editor to the new correct URL.
4. For external broken links: Find an updated or equivalent URL on the target website. If the content no longer exists anywhere, either remove the link or replace it with an alternative source that covers the same topic.
5. For deleted product pages (e-commerce): Redirect to the closest equivalent product, the parent category page, or the homepage if no alternative exists.
6. Verify the fix: After making changes, re-run the broken link checker on the same page to confirm the links now return 200 status codes.

How Often Should You Check for Broken Links?

The frequency of link audits depends on how actively your site changes. For a static informational website with minimal content updates, a quarterly check is sufficient. For an active blog publishing multiple posts per week, monthly audits are advisable.

E-commerce stores — especially those running dropshipping businesses — should check weekly or bi-weekly. Product catalogues change constantly, and supplier URLs expire without notice. A broken product link on a high-converting landing page can directly cost sales.

For large websites with thousands of pages, prioritize auditing your highest-traffic pages first rather than attempting to scan the entire site at once.

International Example — SaaS Documentation Site (Germany)

A B2B software company headquartered in Berlin maintains an extensive documentation hub with over 400 articles. After a major platform rebrand, their entire URL structure changed from /docs/v1/ to /documentation/. Without setting up proper redirects, every internal link across 400+ articles became a broken link overnight.

Their development team used a broken link checker on their main documentation index page to identify the scope of the problem. The tool found 67 broken internal links on the index page alone. Rather than manually updating each one, they implemented server-level 301 redirects using an .htaccess rewrite rule to map old URL patterns to new ones. Within two weeks, Googlebot had re-crawled all pages under the new URL structure and the documentation hub regained its previous organic search visibility.

Broken Link Building — An Advanced SEO Opportunity

Broken link building is a legitimate and widely-used SEO link acquisition technique. The strategy works as follows: you identify broken links on authoritative external websites in your niche, create or identify content on your own site that could replace the dead resource, and then reach out to the website owner suggesting they replace the broken link with your working resource.

This is a win for the website owner (they fix a dead link) and a win for you (you gain a quality backlink). For Indian digital marketers and SEO professionals, this technique works particularly well in competitive niches like finance, health, education, and technology where many older authoritative resources have disappeared over the years.

The broken link checker can help you identify these opportunities by scanning competitor resource pages or industry directories for dead links you could potentially reclaim.

Using the StoreDropship Broken Link Checker

The broken link checker tool on StoreDropship makes the entire audit process straightforward. Enter any public webpage URL, and the tool extracts all links from the page, checks each one's HTTP status in real time, and presents a filtered, color-coded report showing working links, broken links, and unknown-status links.

The results dashboard gives you an instant summary count, and the one-click "Copy Broken Links" button lets you quickly export the dead URLs for use in your content management system or spreadsheet tracker. No account, no software installation, and no data sent to any server — everything runs in your browser.