Broken links · 3 min read
Link Rot: The Quiet Drain on Your SEO and Campaigns
Retired landing pages, CMS migrations and moved partner pages leave dead ends across your site.
Link rot is gradual. A campaign page gets unpublished, a partner restructures their site, a CMS migration changes your URL patterns, and over months your site picks up dead ends that nobody notices until a stakeholder clicks one in a meeting.
Where it hurts
- User journeys: visitors hit 404s mid-funnel and drop off.
- SEO: broken internal links waste the value of your internal linking and the visits search engines send you.
- Performance: long redirect chains slow pages down.
- Credibility: dead outbound links make content look outdated.
The usual suspects
- Retired campaign landing pages still linked from blog posts and emails.
- URL changes from a redesign or CMS migration without full redirect mapping.
- Third-party pages: partners, directories, press coverage, documentation.
- Hard-coded links to staging or old domains.
What good hygiene looks like
- Crawl the full site on a schedule, not just after a launch.
- Fix internal links at the source instead of relying on redirects.
- Use permanent (301) redirects for retired URLs and collapse redirect chains.
- Track the count over time so you can report progress.
Our monthly link scan crawls your whole site, flags broken links, timeouts and redirect chains, and tells you exactly which page each one lives on.