A broken internal link — pointing to a page that's been deleted, moved, or was mistyped — wastes crawl budget, creates a dead end for visitors, and signals a lack of site maintenance that can subtly affect how Google judges overall site quality.
A broken internal link wastes crawl budget, breaks the user's path through your site, and signals neglect to both visitors and search engines.
Broken internal links create a genuinely poor experience for visitors who click through expecting to reach relevant content, only to encounter an error page instead — this friction can meaningfully affect visitor trust and engagement, particularly if encountered repeatedly across a site visit.
Search engines also expend crawl budget attempting to follow these broken links, representing a genuine, if modest, inefficiency in how your site's limited crawl attention gets allocated — comprehensive link health directly supports more efficient crawling of your actually valuable, functioning content.
Broken links commonly accumulate over time through a genuinely common pattern — content gets moved, renamed, or removed without the corresponding internal links throughout the rest of the site being updated to reflect this change, meaning link health tends to degrade gradually rather than remaining static, making periodic auditing a genuinely necessary ongoing practice rather than a one-time fix.
Systematic link auditing across your site, followed by either updating broken links to their correct current destination or removing links to genuinely removed content, addresses this accumulated degradation — establishing this as a periodic practice, rather than a single one-time cleanup, prevents this same issue from silently re-accumulating as your site continues evolving.
A full site crawl shows zero broken internal links.
Fix it, then re-scan — the check confirms itself. No manual checkbox, the scan is the truth.
Run this check in H.I.V.E. →