Dead Link

What Is a Dead Link?

Dead links are more than a usability problem: they waste crawl budget, break the flow of link equity, and signal to Google that your site is poorly maintained. On older websites, dead links accumulate over the years and slowly drag down SEO performance. A monthly check with Screaming Frog or Google Search Console is therefore a must for technical SEO.

A dead link refers to a link that points to a page that is no longer accessible — usually because the target page was deleted, the URL became outdated, or the server isn’t responding. The link leads to error pages like 404, 410, or 503. Dead links are a common problem on established websites, since target pages constantly disappear from the web. They harm user experience and can indirectly waste crawling resources when search engine bots hit broken URLs.

Technically, dead links cause several problems: first, they waste valuable crawl budget (the number of pages Google crawls) when Google processes the broken URL. Second, they damage user experience — every broken internal link frustrates visitors. Third, dead links on your own site can quickly become a crawl problem, especially if there are hundreds or thousands of them. Tools like Screaming Frog or Google Search Console make it easy to identify and fix dead links.

In practice, every website should be checked for dead links regularly — ideally monthly. Broken links should either be fixed or redirected via 301 to relevant replacement pages. For external dead links: if the target is gone for good, remove the link from the page or replace it with one pointing to a similar, functional resource. This signals to Google that the website is being actively maintained.