Every business that has invested in SEO owns an asset most executives never audit: its backlink profile. Links earned through PR, partnerships, and content marketing represent real money spent. And like any asset, they depreciate — quietly, invisibly, and faster than most teams realise.
The culprit is broken backlinks: links pointing at your site from pages that no longer exist, or links aimed at URLs on your site that have since moved or been deleted. Either way, the authority stops flowing. You paid for it once; you’re no longer receiving it.
Two kinds of broken links, two different losses
It helps to separate them:
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Inbound links pointing to dead pages on your site. You redesigned, changed a URL structure, or removed a product page — and every external link aimed at that URL now hits a 404. All the authority those links carried is stranded.
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Links on pages that themselves disappeared. The publisher deleted the article, restructured their site, or let the domain lapse. Your link vanished with it, usually without notice.
The first type is fully within your control and is often the single fastest SEO win available to an established site. The second requires outreach, but knowing about it at least lets you replace the placement.
How to find them
Start by pulling your full list of referring URLs from whichever backlink tool you use, then check which ones still resolve. Doing this manually is impractical past a few dozen links — a broken backlink checker will run the whole list and flag every URL that returns an error, so you get a clean report instead of clicking through hundreds of pages.
Cross-check that against your own site’s 404 report. Any external link pointing at a URL that no longer exists on your domain is recoverable authority sitting idle.
For a fuller walkthrough of the process, including how to prioritise which links to chase first, this guide on how to find broken backlinks covers the practical steps.
Fixing what you find
Work in order of value:
1.
Redirect your own dead URLs. A 301 from the old URL to the closest relevant page recovers most of the link equity immediately. This is the highest-return fix and takes minutes.
2.
Ask publishers to update. If a publisher moved or broke the link, a short, polite email often gets it corrected — especially if you point to the exact fix.
3.
Replace what can’t be recovered. If the host page is gone for good, treat it as a lost placement and budget for a replacement.
4.
Confirm the fix worked. Re-run the check after a few weeks to make sure redirects resolve and updated links are live.
Make it a scheduled audit, not a rescue mission
The businesses that get the most from link building are rarely the ones that build the most links — they’re the ones that stop losing the links they already have. A quarterly check takes under an hour and routinely recovers authority that would otherwise sit idle for years.
It’s also worth confirming that new links are actually being counted in the first place. A link only contributes once search engines have crawled and indexed the page it sits on, which is why teams running serious link campaigns verify indexation as part of the same routine. Platforms such as IndexVero automate that side of it — submitting, indexing, and tracking what landed — so the whole audit becomes a repeatable process rather than an annual scramble.
The bottom line
Broken backlinks are a silent, compounding cost. Finding them takes an afternoon; ignoring them costs you authority every month. Audit quarterly, fix in order of value, and you’ll get full return on link building you’ve already paid for.
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