The Broken Links Google Already Found on Your Site
Broken links don’t announce themselves. A page gets deleted, a URL structure changes, a typo makes it into a menu link, and the site keeps working for everyone who doesn’t happen to click that specific thing. Google, meanwhile, already knows exactly which links are broken, because it tried to follow them.
Where broken links actually come from
Almost none of them are dramatic:
- Unlinked deletions. A page gets deleted or unpublished with no redirect left behind.
- CMS or permalink changes. A migration or URL structure change quietly breaks every internal link built against the old paths.
- Typos. Someone hand-types a link into a menu or a piece of content and gets a character wrong.
- Link rot. A page linked to an external site years ago, and that site has since restructured or shut down without either side noticing.
None of these require anything to have gone wrong operationally. The site works, visitors mostly don’t notice, and the broken links just accumulate in the background until something forces a look, usually a drop in traffic nobody’s connected to the actual cause yet.
They also compound over time rather than resolving on their own. A single deleted page without a redirect is one broken link. Multiply that by every internal page that ever linked to it, every year a site has existed, and every restructuring it’s been through, and a site that’s five or ten years old can easily be carrying hundreds of dead links nobody’s looked at since they were created.
The difference between a 404 and a soft 404
A clean 404 is a page that correctly reports it doesn’t exist. A soft 404 is a page that returns a 200 OK status while showing content that’s effectively an error message, blank, or otherwise not what the URL promised. Google explicitly treats these as a distinct category in Search Console’s Pages report, separate from ordinary 404s, precisely because the status code says one thing and the content says another.
Soft 404s are more expensive to deal with than they look. A real 404 is fast for a crawler to identify and move past. A soft 404 has to be fully loaded and evaluated before Google can work out that it’s effectively broken, spending more of a site’s crawl budget on a page that was never going to be indexed anyway.
Why broken links cost more than a bad user experience
The visitor experience is the obvious cost, someone lands on a dead page and leaves. The less obvious cost is what happens to crawl budget and internal link equity. Every internal link pointing at a dead or soft-404 page is a link that isn’t pointing at something that could actually rank, and every crawl of a broken URL is a crawl that didn’t go toward a page that needed it.
On a small site this barely registers. On a site with thousands of pages, years of content changes, and an internal linking structure nobody’s audited in a while, it adds up to a meaningful share of a search engine’s attention spent on pages that don’t exist. It’s the same crawl budget problem we’ve written about with sitemaps that list URLs Google shouldn’t be prioritizing: every broken or soft-404 link is another page competing for crawl attention that a live, indexable page needed instead.
Does Google already know about my broken links?
Yes. Search Console’s Pages report specifically lists “Not found (404)” and “Soft 404” as their own categories under pages excluded from indexing, built from what Googlebot has actually tried to crawl. The exact path is Search Console, then Pages, then the excluded reasons list. Most sites have this data sitting available and simply never open that specific report to look at it.
A quick self-audit
- Check Search Console’s Pages report for both “Not found (404)” and “Soft 404” entries. The data usually already exists; it just hasn’t been looked at.
- After deleting or restructuring any page, redirect the old URL rather than letting it 404 or, worse, resolve to a soft 404.
- Audit internal links after any CMS migration or permalink change specifically, since that’s the single most common source of broken links appearing all at once.
- Don’t forget outbound links. A page linking to an external site that’s since gone down or restructured is broken from a visitor’s perspective too, even though it’s not your infrastructure.
kant.au’s Site Analysis feature crawls your site and flags broken and soft-404 links directly, without waiting for a Search Console report nobody’s checked in months. Want to see what’s actually broken on your site right now? Start a free 14-day trial and find out.
Google Search Central: Soft 404 errors
Google Search Central: Page indexing report