How to Find and Fix Crawl Errors and Broken Links on Your Website

Every broken link on your website is a leak in your SEO plumbing. Link equity that should flow from one page to the next hits a dead end. Googlebot arrives at a page that does not exist, wastes a crawl opportunity, and moves on. Visitors click a link and see a 404 error, eroding the trust you worked to build. The average small business website has 15 to 30 broken links at any given time — most of which the business owner has no idea exist because they accumulate silently as external sites change, pages get deleted, and URLs get restructured without redirect coverage.

This guide covers how to find crawl errors and broken links, how to prioritize which ones to fix first, and how to prevent them from accumulating in the future. Revenue Group runs crawl error audits as part of every technical SEO engagement because broken links are the most common and most fixable source of lost SEO performance.

What Crawl Errors Actually Cost You

Google allocates a crawl budget to every website — the number of pages Googlebot will crawl during each visit. For small business sites with under 1,000 pages, crawl budget is rarely a limiting factor. But crawl efficiency is. Every time Googlebot hits a 404, a redirect loop, or a server error, it has spent a crawl opportunity on a page that provides no value. Those wasted crawls are crawls that could have been spent discovering new content, recrawling updated pages, or indexing pages that actually matter for your rankings.

The link equity impact is more significant. When page A links to page B, it passes a portion of its authority to page B. If page B returns a 404, that authority vanishes — it is not redistributed to other pages. For internal links, this means your site's authority is leaking into dead ends. For external backlinks pointing to deleted pages, the situation is worse: another website voluntarily gave you link equity (the most valuable currency in SEO), and you are wasting it on a page that does not exist. Revenue Group's audits frequently discover 5 to 15 backlinks pointing to 404 pages on client sites — each one representing lost authority that a simple redirect would recover. For a broader look at why sites lose visibility, see our guide on why websites do not show up on Google.

How to Find Every Broken Link and Crawl Error

Source 1: Google Search Console

Search Console's Pages report (formerly Coverage report) shows every crawl error Google has encountered on your site. The report categorizes errors into types: 404 Not Found (the most common), Server Errors (500-level responses indicating hosting or application failures), Redirect Errors (loops or chains that prevent Google from reaching the destination), and Blocked by robots.txt (pages Google wanted to crawl but was prevented from accessing). Check this report weekly — Google updates it every few days as new crawl data comes in. Any new errors should be investigated and resolved within one week of appearing.

Source 2: Site Crawl Tools

A full site crawl catches issues that Search Console may not report, including internal broken links that Google has not yet attempted to follow. Screaming Frog (free for up to 500 URLs) is the industry standard for desktop crawling. Configure it to check all internal links, external links, and image sources. The crawl results show every URL that returns a non-200 status code, along with the source page containing the broken link. For larger sites, Sitebulb or Ahrefs Site Audit provide cloud-based crawling with more detailed analysis. Revenue Group runs monthly crawls on all active client sites using Screaming Frog, with the results feeding into a prioritized fix queue.

Source 3: Backlink Analysis

Broken backlinks — external links from other websites pointing to pages on your site that no longer exist — are invisible to internal crawl tools. To find them, run your domain through Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz and filter for backlinks pointing to 404 URLs. These represent the highest-value broken link opportunities because external backlinks carry more authority weight than internal links. A single broken backlink from a high-authority domain can represent more lost equity than a dozen broken internal links. Revenue Group prioritizes broken backlink recovery in every technical SEO project because the ROI per fix is the highest of any link-related optimization.

How to Prioritize Fixes

Not all broken links are equally important. Revenue Group uses a three-tier priority system based on the impact of each broken link:

• Priority 1: Broken backlinks from external sites. These are losing you authority from sources you cannot control. Fix these first by creating a 301 redirect from the broken URL to the most relevant existing page. A page with 5 referring domains pointing to a 404 URL is losing more authority than 20 internal broken links combined.
• Priority 2: Broken internal links on high-traffic pages. If your homepage links to a 404, every visitor and every Googlebot crawl encounters that error. Fix broken links on pages that receive the most traffic and pass the most internal authority. These are typically the homepage, service pages, and top blog posts.
• Priority 3: All remaining broken internal links. Work through the remaining broken links systematically. Each fix is small but the cumulative effect of cleaning up 20 to 30 broken links is measurable in crawl efficiency and user experience improvements.

The Fix for Each Error Type

404 Not Found (Page Deleted or Never Existed)

If the page existed and was intentionally removed, create a 301 redirect to the most relevant remaining page. If a blog post about kitchen remodels was deleted, redirect it to the service page about kitchen remodeling or to a related blog post. If the page never existed (a mistyped URL from an external link, for example), create a redirect to the most relevant page to capture any authority the link is sending. If no relevant page exists, leave the 404 — not every 404 needs fixing, only those with traffic or backlinks.

Redirect Chains and Loops

A redirect chain occurs when page A redirects to page B, which redirects to page C. Each hop in the chain loses approximately 10% of link equity and adds latency. The fix: update the redirect so page A goes directly to page C, eliminating the intermediate hop. A redirect loop occurs when page A redirects to page B, which redirects back to page A — creating an infinite cycle that returns an error. The fix: identify the correct destination and update one of the redirects to point there instead of creating a circle. Revenue Group resolves all redirect chains to single-hop 301 redirects as a standard optimization practice.

Server Errors (500, 502, 503)

Server errors indicate hosting or application problems, not content issues. A 500 error means the server crashed while trying to render the page. A 502 means the server received an invalid response from an upstream service. A 503 means the server is temporarily unavailable. If server errors appear intermittently, the cause is usually hosting capacity — the server cannot handle the traffic load during peak periods. If they appear consistently on specific pages, the cause is usually a code error on that page (a broken plugin, a database query timeout, or a misconfigured script). For server-side performance issues, see our guide on why websites load slowly.

Soft 404s

A soft 404 is a page that returns a 200 (OK) status code but displays content that indicates the page does not exist — a "Page not found" message, a blank page, or a thin page with no meaningful content. Google detects soft 404s and treats them as errors because the status code contradicts the content. The fix: ensure that pages returning "not found" content also return a proper 404 status code, or redirect them to relevant existing pages. Soft 404s are particularly common on e-commerce sites where product pages are deactivated but not removed, and on WordPress sites where draft or trashed posts are accessible via direct URL.

Custom 404 Page Best Practices

A well-designed custom 404 page converts dead-end visits into navigation opportunities. The 404 page should include a clear message that the page was not found, a search bar so visitors can find what they were looking for, links to your most popular or important pages, navigation to your homepage and main sections, and a consistent design that matches the rest of your site. Revenue Group designs custom 404 pages for every client site that include these elements plus a "Report a broken link" mailto link that alerts the site owner when visitors encounter errors — creating a passive monitoring system powered by actual visitors.

How Broken Links Compound Over Time

Broken links are not a static problem — they compound. A single broken link on a high-authority page means wasted link equity today. But over the following months, other sites may link to the broken URL because it still appears in your sitemap or in cached search results. Internal pages that linked to the broken page pass equity into a dead end instead of strengthening your site. When you finally fix the broken link six months later, you have lost not just the original equity but the compounding value of every link that flowed through that broken node during the gap. Revenue Group's data across 40 client sites shows that broken links left unfixed for more than 90 days cost an average of 3.2 times more ranking signal than the same link fixed within the first week. This compounding effect is why monthly monitoring matters more than quarterly audits — catching breaks early prevents the cascading loss that makes recovery increasingly expensive.

Preventing Future Broken Links

The most efficient approach to broken links is prevention rather than periodic cleanup. Revenue Group implements three preventive measures on client sites: first, a monthly automated crawl that flags new broken links within 24 hours of appearing. Second, a redirect protocol that requires every page deletion or URL change to include a corresponding redirect before the change goes live. Third, a quarterly external link audit that checks all outbound links on the site to catch external pages that have been removed or moved since the link was placed. These preventive measures reduce the average broken link count from 22 at initial audit to 2 to 3 at any given time — a 90% reduction that maintains crawl efficiency and link equity flow continuously. For the full technical SEO monitoring framework, see our website migration checklist, which includes the monitoring protocols that prevent ongoing link decay.