404 Errors & Broken Links
Every dead link is a customer walking into a wall. We find the missing pages, restore or redirect them, and clean up the links pointing nowhere.
A dead link is a customer walking into a wall.
Nobody reports a 404. They tap a link, see an error page, decide the business is not on top of things, and leave. You never hear about it. Multiply that by every stale link, every page moved in a redesign, and every product retired without a forwarding address, and a site can quietly bleed customers for years.
Search engines are less forgiving than people. A page that used to rank and now returns an error loses its position, and every link pointing at it — every citation you earned — stops passing value. A redesign that renames URLs without redirecting them can erase years of accumulated authority in a weekend. It is one of the most common and most expensive mistakes on the web.
The fix begins with a full inventory, because you cannot repair what you have not found. We crawl the site the way a search engine does, pull the errors Google has already recorded, and check the links pointing in from elsewhere. That produces an honest list: what is missing, what still gets traffic, and what other sites still point to.
Then each broken URL gets a decision rather than a blanket rule. A page that still earns traffic and links gets restored or redirected to its true replacement. A page with no equivalent goes to the most relevant parent, not lazily to the homepage — search engines treat a pile of homepage redirects as a soft error, and visitors treat it as being ignored. Genuinely dead pages get a clean status and a useful error page that offers a way forward.
Internal links get the same treatment, since those are entirely within your control and there is no excuse for leaving them broken. When the cleanup is done, the crawl budget stops being spent on dead ends, the authority flows back where it belongs, and visitors stop hitting walls.
If the errors trace back to a botched migration or a platform that renames URLs on a whim, the real fix may be structural — see replacing WordPress or a custom build. And if traffic dropped at the same time, start with visibility recovery.
The work
How the dead ends get closed
Full crawl
Every URL checked the way a search engine sees it, so nothing broken stays hidden.
Traffic-weighted
Errors ranked by the traffic and links they still hold, so the costly ones get fixed first.
Honest redirects
Each URL sent to its true replacement, not dumped on the homepage where it counts as an error.
Internal links
The links you control cleaned up first — the easiest fix and the one most often skipped.
Inbound links saved
Citations from other sites preserved so the authority you earned keeps flowing.
A useful 404 page
When a page truly is gone, an error page that offers the visitor a way onward instead of a wall.
How many dead links does your site have?
Almost every site that has been through a redesign is carrying broken URLs nobody knows about. A crawl finds them in minutes, and shows which ones are still costing you traffic.
Three lenses
What broken links cost
Authority preserved
Redirects keep the ranking value of every page and link you spent years earning.
Clean to crawl
Answer engines that hit dead ends learn less about you, and cite you less often.
No walls
A visitor who never meets an error page never gets the impression you stopped paying attention.
The cleanup path
Crawl
Inventory every URL and error, including the ones Google has already recorded against you.
Prioritize
Rank the breakage by the traffic and inbound links each dead URL still holds.
Redirect
Restore what should live, map the rest to its true replacement, retire the rest cleanly.
Monitor
Watch for new errors as the site changes, so the cleanup does not slowly undo itself.
Questions
Frequently asked
A 404 means the page a visitor requested no longer exists at that address. It matters because visitors rarely report it — they simply leave — and because search engines drop pages that return errors, taking the rankings and inbound link value with them.
Almost always because URLs changed without redirects. When a redesign renames pages and the old addresses are not pointed at the new ones, every ranking and every inbound link built up over years stops counting. Mapping proper redirects usually recovers most of it.
No — search engines treat mass homepage redirects as soft 404s, so the ranking value is lost anyway, and visitors treat it as being ignored. Each URL should point to its true replacement, or to the most relevant section. Only genuinely dead pages should return a clean error.
Crawl the site the way a search engine does, then cross-check what Google has already flagged and what links point in from other sites. That produces a complete list of dead URLs plus the traffic and authority each one still holds, so the expensive breakages get fixed first.
Yes, in three ways: pages returning errors lose their rankings, inbound links pointing at those pages stop passing authority, and crawl budget is spent on dead ends instead of your real content. Internal broken links are the easiest to fix and the most often ignored.
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