What Is a Broken Link and Why Does It Matter?
A broken link is a hyperlink that no longer works. Learn what causes them, why they matter for SEO and user experience, and how to find them.
What Is a Broken Link and Why Does It Matter?
A broken link is a hyperlink on a website that no longer works. When a visitor clicks it, instead of landing on the expected page, they get an error — most commonly a 404 Not Found response. The destination page may have been deleted, moved, or the URL may have simply been typed incorrectly in the first place.
Broken links can appear anywhere: in navigation menus, blog posts, product pages, footers, or image links. They affect both internal links (pointing to other pages on your own site) and external links (pointing to other websites).
Why do links break?
Links break for several reasons. Pages get deleted or restructured during a website redesign. External websites go offline or change their URL structure. A CMS migration changes how URLs are formatted. Someone simply makes a typo when adding a link manually.
None of these are unusual — on any active website, broken links accumulate over time without anyone noticing.
Why does it matter?
A broken link is a dead end for your visitors. Someone following a link to your pricing page, a product, or a support article lands on an error page instead. That is a bad experience, and on many sites it means the visitor simply leaves.
For search engines, broken links are a signal that a website is not well maintained. Crawlers follow links to discover and index content — a page that cannot be reached may not get indexed at all. Internal broken links can also waste crawl budget, meaning Google spends time on dead ends instead of your actual content.
For websites that have been online for a few years, it is not unusual to find dozens of broken links that nobody noticed because no one clicked them recently.
How do you find broken links?
You can check individual pages manually, but that does not scale. The practical approach is to use a crawler that systematically follows every link on your site and reports which ones return errors. dislike404.com does exactly that — it crawls your website and lists every broken link, including the page it was found on, so you know exactly where to fix it.