Broken Links, Redirects, and 404 Hygiene
Every site develops broken links. Pages get renamed, products retire, an external site restructures, someone pastes a URL with a typo. Individually trivial, collectively they leak visitors and make a site feel abandoned.
Find them
Two sources cover almost everything. Search Console's page indexing report lists URLs returning 404 that search engines know about, which are the ones with external links or history. A crawler run across your own site finds internal links pointing at nothing. Between them you will have a complete list in twenty minutes.
Decide what each one deserves
- Page moved: a 301 redirect to the new URL. Permanent, passes signals, and is the right answer most of the time.
- Page retired with a close equivalent: 301 to the equivalent, not to the homepage. A redirect to an unrelated page is treated as a soft 404 and helps nobody.
- Page retired with no equivalent: let it 404, or 410 if you want to be explicit. A clean 404 is a legitimate answer.
- Broken internal link: fix the link itself. Do not add a redirect to paper over a typo in your own content.
- Broken external link: update it to the current URL or remove it.
Keep the redirect list from becoming a problem
Redirect chains, where A points to B which points to C, slow every request and lose signal at each hop. When you add a redirect, check whether the destination is itself redirected and point straight at the final URL. Review the whole list once a year and remove entries for URLs nobody has requested in a decade.
Make the 404 page useful
Most 404 pages apologize and stop. Yours should include your main navigation, a search box, links to your top three pages, and your phone number. A visitor who hit a dead link is still a visitor, and a helpful 404 recovers a meaningful share of them.
Cadence
Check quarterly, and always immediately after a redesign, a migration, or any bulk content cleanup. Those three events produce more broken links than years of ordinary editing.
