What this means
Pages on your site contain <a href> links to other pages on your site that return errors. This wastes crawl budget, degrades user experience, and leaks link equity. The JSON field is broken_internal.
Detection condition
Triggered when len(page.BrokenLinks) > 0. SEODiff follows every internal link and checks the destination's HTTP status.
Impact on scores
Severity weight: 12. Deductions: −18 on Indexability. Also creates negative signals for crawlers that follow these links and find dead ends.
Common causes
- Deleted pages: Content removed without updating links or adding redirects.
- URL structure changes: Slug or path format changed without redirects.
- Typos in templates: Hardcoded URLs with errors in navigation or footer templates.
- Dynamic content removal: Products/categories removed from CMS but still linked in related content.
How to fix
- Export the list of broken links from your SEODiff report.
- For each broken link, either restore the target page, add a redirect to an equivalent page, or remove the link.
- Check templates (navigation, footer, sidebar) for hardcoded broken URLs.
- Set up monitoring to catch new broken links as they appear.