broken backlinks

A backlink breaks the moment its destination stops resolving. The usual trigger is on your end: you deleted a page, renamed a URL, migrated a CMS, or changed your folder structure without redirects. Sometimes the fault is external, where the linking site mistyped the URL or added stray characters. Either way the editorial link still exists on the referring page, but clicks now hit an error and the link has nowhere to send its value.

Finding and fixing them

Pull a broken backlinks report in a tool like Ahrefs Site Explorer (Backlinks profile, filtered to 404s), or cross-reference Search Console’s not-found list against your backlink data. Sort by the authority of the referring domain so you repair the links that matter first.

Two clean fixes:

• Restore the page if it was removed by mistake, so every existing link works again.
• 301 redirect the dead URL to the closest live equivalent. Google’s own docs say the indexing pipeline uses a 301 as the signal that the redirect target should be canonical, which consolidates the old page’s signals onto the new one. Point it at a genuinely relevant page, though. Redirecting everything to the homepage reads as a soft 404 and passes little value.

There is also the offensive version, broken link building: find dead pages on other sites that still attract links, then pitch your own live resource as the replacement.