Broken links that eat rankings

Internal 404s are structurally worse than external ones. You point at your own site and arrive nowhere. That wastes crawl budget and drives internal equity into a wall. External 404s mostly annoy, until dozens sit on one page and the content feels like a graveyard. A footer with six dead “partners” says more about maintenance than about partnerships, and it undercuts the trust the rest of the page tries to build.

Fix internal links first. Send a 301 to the replacement, or remove the link. Soft 404s belong in the same pass: the HTML says “not found”, but the status is 200. To a crawler the page then appears to exist while offering nothing useful. A 410 on something that is truly gone is more honest than a 200 with an empty message. After a rebrand or URL change, map old paths in one go, not ticket by ticket over three months. Piecemeal fixes let new dead links grow faster than you clear them.

Crawl deep and prioritise

The homepage is rarely the problem. Dead links sit in 2022 articles, landing-page menus, PDFs and old campaigns. A crawl that only covers home misses exactly that depth. Crawlers that cover hundreds of pages per round exist for that reason: they surface what a shallow scan skips. External links deserve a periodic check, for example once a quarter, unless you cite news that vanishes quickly. Internal links belong in a fresh pass after every content release, or the pile grows until the next “big clean-up” that never arrives.

Prioritise by inbound internal links. A 404 that hangs from nowhere is clutter. A 404 called from the menu or from ten posts is a hole in the internal structure. Fix the second one the same day. The first can wait for the weekly clean-up. That split saves chasing links nobody follows while the links people do follow keep eating rankings and crawl budget.