Internal Links

Why it matters

Internal links are how pages on your site connect to each other. They pass ranking signals between pages, they define site structure for crawlers, and they provide navigation paths for visitors. A broken internal link wastes all three.

Broken internal links tell Google that the destination page no longer exists. If the destination is important — a product page, a key category, a piece of content you want to rank — broken internal links accelerate its deindexing by cutting it off from the crawl graph.

From a user perspective, a visitor following an internal link to a 404 page is a worse outcome than a visitor who never found the link. You have created an expectation and failed it.

Internal link structure also matters for how ranking signals distribute across a site. A new page that receives no internal links is effectively invisible to the crawler until it appears in a sitemap or earns an external link. Broken links in your existing structure divert signals that should reach pages you have invested in.

How we check it

We extract all internal links from the page and send a HEAD request to each one. HEAD requests ask the server for status information only — no body content is downloaded. This keeps the check fast without adding meaningful load to your server.

We cap the check at 100 links per page. All broken destinations are reported in a single alert, showing the path component of each broken URL to keep output readable.

What to watch for

Multiple broken links pointing to the same destination usually indicate a page that was removed or moved without a redirect. Implement a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one and the links resolve correctly.

A single broken link is often a typo in a manually added link in a CMS editor. Check HTTP status codes for the broken URLs — a 404 needs a redirect or a URL correction, a 500 needs server-side investigation.