What Are Dead Links?
Updated July 2026
Have you ever clicked a link and landed on a “404 Not Found” error page? That’s a dead link. This happens more frequently than you might expect. On the web, sites change their structure, or their URL naming system, domain names are sold, and websites go dark. The phenomenon is called “link rot.”
One 2003 study found that one in every 200 links breaks each week. I would link to that study, but between the time I wrote this piece originally and this refresh, the study has disappeared behind a paywall.(https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/spe.577). More recently, Ahrefs found that 66.5% of links died over the previous 9 years. Another study found 38% of the links on the New York Times website were inaccessible or lead to the wrong content.
There are two main types of links. They each have a different type of impact on your site, and there are different strategies for fixing them.
Outbound links are the links from your web page to other web content.
These can rot away because a site went dark, the page name or site structure changed, or because that particular content was deleted.
Inbound links connect to your web content from another website or page.
These can break when you make a change to your website structure, delete old content, or experience a redirect error.
Finding and Fixing Dead Outbound Links
Why should you fix dead links?
Broken links on a web page affect a user’s experience. Sometimes called link rot, it breaks an implied promise to your visitor.
“Since users are irritated by linkrot, it is in your interest to reduce the amount of dead links in your own pages. The overall quality of the user experience strongly influences people’s assessment of the credibility and value of a site: if a site doesn’t work well, users will abandon it. Not only are dead links disappointing to users, they also rob your users of the value they were supposed to gain from going to the destination site.”
Jacob Nielsen on NN Group
Some SEO consultants believe that outbound link rot is also negative ranking factor. John Mueller of Google has said that the Googlebot isn’t concerned with broken links. Yet he says fixing these links is an important part of website management. Because you don’t want visitors to be frustrated with your site and bounce out.
Finding Outbound Link Rot
I use Screaming Frog to crawl the website and find broken links. If you use WordPress for your website, there are plugins to help you find broken links. I’ve used Broken Link Checker from WPMU Dev. When you are logged in as an administrator, and viewing your webpages, broken links have a strikethrough.
Fixing a Dead Link
- Check if there is a mistake in the URL. I’ve been known to make typos or cut-and-paste errors
- Search the site where the content used to be. Perhaps the content is still there but has a new URL
- Check archive.org for an archived version
- Search for part of the URL. I was able to find the now paywalled study by searching for the last few words of the URL I had for the study mentioned above
Not All Broken Links Can Be Fixed
If I cannot find the web page anywhere, I will sometimes provide the complete old URL, and note that it is no longer available. A visitor could use that as a starting point if they decide to track it down.
Finding and Fixing Inbound Dead Links
Inbound link rot is more likely to affect your site SEO. Broken links no longer count in Google’s ranking factors. It isn’t quite as easy as fixing links on your own website, but worth the effort.
Finding Inbound Link Rot
I often find these as crawled but not indexed in Search Console. In search console, under Indexing, select Pages. Choose “Crawled – currently not indexed” from the list of Why pages aren’t indexed. Select a URL, and click “Inspect URL.” Google will show you what it knows about the page, including the referring page. If the referring page is from another website, then you are looking at a broken inbound link.
Both Ahrefs and Moz have tools that will report on links to your site.
3 Ways to Fix Inbound Links
- Ask for a fix. When you discover a broken inbound link in Search Console, consider the referring website. If it is a low quality scraping site, I will do nothing. If the link is coming from a legitimate site, I will contact the writer.
- Redirect the URL. If I can’t contact the writer, I will set a 404 redirect from the broken inbound link to the correct page.
- Create a replacement page. Maybe this is a good idea for new or refreshed content.
And one Sneaky Trick
Broken links are everywhere. If you find a broken link to a competitor’s site, use it as an opportunity. While looking for backlinks for a client, I discovered a very relevant engineering blog with a broken link to a competing product. I pointed this out, politely, and offered a high-quality photo and live link to replace it. It worked! We now have a photo and link from a very authoritative source.
Dead links? Contact me I can help find and fix dead links >
