What it means
A link on your site points at a URL that does not resolve successfully — a 404 or 410, a 5xx error, a redirect chain of several hops, or a redirect loop. The finding covers internal links, outbound links, and links inside sitemaps and redirects themselves.
Why it matters
For visitors it is a dead end at the exact moment they showed intent. For search engines it wastes crawl budget on URLs that return nothing and breaks the path by which authority reaches your real pages. Redirect chains are subtler: each hop adds a round trip to page load, and a chain that grows past a few hops may simply be abandoned. Links in your navigation or footer are the worst case, because they are broken on every page at once.
How W3Audit detects it
The crawl records the response status of every link it encounters, including the full redirect path with the status of each hop. Findings are grouped by destination, so a footer link broken across two hundred pages is one entry with the pages listed, not two hundred rows. Outbound links are checked too and reported separately, since you control the link but not the destination.
How severe it is
High when internal links are affected, and critical when the broken link sits in site-wide navigation or in a conversion path. Redirect chains of two hops are medium; three or more, or any loop, is high. Broken outbound links are medium — worth fixing, but the cost is credibility rather than crawlability.
How to fix it
Fix by response type, not in bulk:
- 404 with a replacement — update the link to the new URL, and add a 301 from the old URL for anyone else still linking to it.
- 404 with no replacement — remove the link. Redirecting a retired page to the home page is worse than a clean 404: it hides the problem from your reports and confuses search engines.
- Redirect chain — point the link at the final destination and collapse the chain to a single 301.
- 5xx — a server problem, not a link problem. Fix the response before touching the link.
# before: three hops /old-page → 302 /new-page → 301 /new-page/ → 200 # after: one hop, permanent /old-page → 301 /new-page/ → 200
How to verify the fix
Re-crawl and confirm zero internal links returning 4xx or 5xx, and no redirect longer than one hop. Check your server logs or analytics for continued 404 traffic — a fixed link with ongoing hits means another page or an external site still points at the old URL. Confirm retired URLs return 404 or 410 rather than a 200 with an apology.
Where this sits in your audit
This finding belongs to the Technical & crawlability category — see the technical & crawlability audit for everything else reviewed alongside it, or the methodology for how its severity and score contribution are calculated. The website audit checklist includes it as a step you can run yourself.