Definition
A broken internal link is a link on your own site that points to a URL that fails for users and crawlers—typically a 404 or 410 response, a soft-404 page, or a chain that never lands on the intended content. Finding broken internal links means crawling or sampling your HTML, requesting destination URLs, and recording source pages that still promote dead paths.
This check is about path integrity. It does not invent missing topics, and it does not claim ranking gains from cleaning every stray 404 in an old archive folder.
Why it matters
Crawlable links are how discovery moves through a site. When hubs point to dead destinations, crawlers spend requests on failures, and people lose trust mid-journey—especially on B2B paths from category to product to documentation. Useful unique content on a live page still suffers if the links that should bring people and crawlers there are broken.
After migrations and CMS refactors, internal 404s often cluster around renamed products, retired SKUs, and outdated resource lists. Catching them early keeps health work concrete: repair or redirect intentional paths instead of guessing why discovery feels “stuck.”
How to check
- Crawl the site from priority seeds (homepage, main categories) and extract internal
hreftargets from HTML. - Request each unique destination and log status codes, redirect chains, and soft-404 patterns.
- Join failures back to source pages so you know where to edit links.
- Prioritize sources in navigation, product templates, and high-intent hubs before deep archive pages.
- Decide per failure: restore content, update the link to the correct live URL, or keep an intentional 404/410 with no internal promotion.
- Re-crawl affected templates after fixes to confirm the dead path is gone.
A concrete example
A catalog rename moves /products/valve-a/ to /products/valve-a-pro/. The new page is live, but twenty category and comparison pages still link to the old path, which now 404s. A broken-link pass lists those twenty sources first. Editors update hub links to the final URL; the old URL gets a 301 for external bookmarks. The health issue was path integrity, not “need more valve articles.” Growth work—such as a selection guide that does not exist yet—remains a separate opportunity after hubs stop sending people into dead ends.
How Mika separates health issues from growth opportunities
Broken internal links are health issues: discovery and trust paths are damaged. Unanswered buyer questions or missing market pages are growth opportunities. Mika flags dead links with source URLs as foundation repair, and keeps topic gaps on a separate list so cleanup does not get confused with content expansion.
FAQ
Do broken internal links hurt rankings by themselves?
Broken links waste crawl attempts and frustrate users. They are a health problem for discovery and trust. They do not, by themselves, predict how a healthy page will rank. Fix critical paths first, then continue coverage work.
Should we fix every 404 on the site?
Prioritize 404s that appear in navigation, product hubs, and high-traffic templates. Retired URLs can intentionally return 404 or 410. The goal is intentional paths, not a zero-count vanity metric.
What if the page moved but links still point to the old URL?
Prefer updating important internal links to the final URL, and keep redirects as a safety net for bookmarks and external links. Leaving permanent soft failures in main hubs keeps health issues alive.
Sources
- Google Search Central — Link best practices for Google (crawlable links)
- Google Search Central — Crawling and indexing overview
- Google Search Central — Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
- Mika method: path integrity as health, coverage as growth — mikaovo.ai
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