Why do broken links hurt SEO?

Search engines crawl your site the same way visitors browse it: by following links. Every link that returns a 404 is a dead end that wastes crawl budget — time Google could have spent indexing pages that matter.

Broken links also send a quality signal. A site littered with dead ends looks unmaintained, and pages that accumulate broken outbound links tend to drift down in rankings as their perceived usefulness drops. For visitors the effect is more direct: hitting a 404 is the single fastest way to end a session.

The fix is unglamorous but effective: find dead links before your visitors do, then repair, replace, or remove them. That's the whole reason LinkGuard scans in the background on a schedule instead of waiting for someone to complain.

LinkGuard flags anything returning 400+ status codes, DNS failures, and timeouts — internal and external, links and images.