How to find and fix broken links and set redirects

What a broken link and a redirect are

A broken link is any link, on your site or on someone else’s, that points to an address on your site that no longer answers. The server sends back a 404 code, which means not found, and the visitor sees an error page instead of the page they wanted. Links break when a page is deleted or renamed, or when a site is rebuilt.

A redirect is a rule on your server that says when someone asks for this old address, send them to this new one instead. A 301 redirect is permanent and tells Google to move the old page’s ranking history to the new page. A 302 is temporary and tells Google to keep the old address in its index, which is almost never what a local business wants.

Editing a broken link only helps the links you control. A redirect also catches the links on other sites, in old emails and in Google’s own index, so the redirect is the right first move and the link edit is a cleanup afterward.

What broken links look like on a physical therapy clinic site

Portneuf Valley Physical Therapy has clinics in Pocatello and Idaho Falls and sees about 140 patient visits a week between them. The practice rebuilt its site in 2025. The old site used addresses like /services/dry-needling.html and the new one uses /dry-needling/. Nobody set redirects, because the person who built the new site did not know the old addresses existed.

The damage shows up in three places. Referring physicians in Pocatello have the old dry needling address saved in their patient handout, and every patient who types it lands on a 404 page. Google still has 31 of the old addresses in its index, and when they appear in search results and return errors, Google slowly drops the practice’s pages in favor of a competitor whose pages answer. And the practice’s own blog, which was carried over from the old site, has 46 links inside its posts that still point at the old service addresses, so a reader who finishes a post about knee rehab and clicks through to the knee page hits an error.

None of this is visible from the homepage, where the menu works and the phone rings.

A worked example: redirecting a two-clinic practice in Pocatello

The first step was a list of every old address that still received traffic or still had a link pointing at it. The Pages report in Google Search Console lists 404 addresses under the heading Not found, and a crawl of the practice’s own site listed the broken internal links. Here is the top of the list with the decision made for each one.

Forty-one addresses were on the full list and every one got a 301 redirect. The aquatic therapy row is the one that needs a judgment call. The practice no longer offers it, so there is no matching page. Sending that address to the homepage would leave the visitor to start over. Sending it to the services list keeps them one click from whatever they came for, and it keeps Google from treating the redirect as a soft 404.

After the redirects were live, the 46 internal links inside the blog posts were edited to point directly at the new addresses. A redirect works, but a link that goes straight to the page is faster for the reader and cleaner for Google. The last step was to check that each old address returned a single 301 to the new page, not a chain of hops.

How to check your own broken links and redirects

1. Open Google Search Console and click Pages under Indexing. Scroll to the reasons list and click Not found (404). Every address there is one Google has tried to reach and could not. Export the list.
2. Download the free version of Screaming Frog SEO Spider and crawl your domain. Click the Response Codes tab and filter to Client Error (4xx). This shows the broken links inside your own site, and the Inlinks pane at the bottom shows which page each broken link sits on.
3. Search Google for site:yourdomain.com and click every result on the first three pages. Any result that lands on an error page is an old address Google still holds.
4. Paste any old address into httpstatus.io. It will show whether the address redirects, where it goes and how many hops it takes. Anything more than one hop should be shortened to a single redirect straight to the final page.
5. Check the type. If the tool shows 302 instead of 301 on a page that has moved for good, change it to 301.

If you find that two live addresses show the same page, that is a duplicate content problem rather than a broken link, and the fix is a redirect or a canonical tag.

What we do about broken links and redirects

You will get a list of every address on your site that returns an error, where each one is linked from, and the redirect set for it, with a check afterward that each old address arrives at the new page in one hop. Links inside your own pages are updated to point straight at the live page. The list stays on file so that the next time a page is renamed, the redirect goes in the same day. A two-clinic physical therapy practice whose clean addresses went from 21 to 807 of 1,281 in two days started with exactly this list. It is the first thing checked in every site audit.

Questions people ask about SEO: how to find and fix broken links and set redirects