A broken link doesn't look like much. Someone clicks through and lands on a "page not found" instead of what they were after, shrugs, and leaves. Multiply that across a site that's been growing for a few years, old pages removed, services renamed, blog posts deleted, and it adds up to something search engines notice even if visitors don't complain about it directly.
A business blog is one of the most common sources of this. Posts get updated, retitled, or taken down as a business moves on, and any link pointing to the old version breaks unless something's redirecting it, which is worth bearing in mind if you're weighing up whether your site needs a blog in the first place.
How Common Are Broken Links on a Business Website?
More than most business owners would guess. An analysis of over 300,000 websites by SEMrush found broken internal links on 35% of sites, making it one of the most common technical issues out there. Separately, Screaming Frog's crawl data puts the average site at 17 broken links, with larger sites running into the hundreds.
None of that is unusual for a site that's been live a while. It's just rarely anyone's job to go back and check.
Do Broken Links Actually Hurt SEO and Google Rankings?
Indirectly, but the effect is real. A page that returns a "not found" error doesn't get indexed, and if it used to rank for something, that ranking disappears with it. Google also spends a limited amount of time crawling any given site, and broken links waste part of that on dead ends instead of the pages that are actually worth finding.
There's a knock-on effect for trust too. If a highly linked page suddenly breaks, some of the credibility that page had built up simply evaporates rather than passing anywhere useful. It's not just Google either, the AI tools increasingly used for local business search rely on the same kind of crawling, so a dead page is invisible to them too.
What Happens When You Actually Fix Them?
In one case study covering this, cleaning up broken pages and unnecessary redirect chains led to 18% more pages getting indexed and a 12% increase in organic traffic within eight weeks. Nothing about the site's content changed, it was purely a case of removing dead ends so search engines (and visitors) could actually reach what was there.
That kind of result lines up with what we've seen elsewhere too, a site that isn't reachable doesn't rank, which is one of the more overlooked reasons behind a website not getting traffic in the first place.
How Do You Find and Fix Broken Links on Your Own Site?
It doesn't need to be complicated.
- Run a free broken link checker occasionally, most will crawl a whole site and list every dead link in one go.
- Check Google Search Console's Pages report for anything marked "not found (404)".
- Redirect old, removed, or renamed pages to their closest current equivalent rather than leaving them to 404.
- Recheck after any big content clear-out, since that's when broken links tend to appear in bulk.
For a Sheffield business with a site that's grown organically over a few years, this is exactly the kind of thing that's easy to let slide, nothing looks urgent about a handful of dead links, right up until they've quietly cost a chunk of the site's visibility. It's the same reasoning behind keeping a website checked and current generally, small, regular maintenance beats a big fix later.
If you're not sure how many broken links are sitting on your site right now, get in touch with our team and we'll take a proper look.
