Broken page with backlinks

Severity: Critical
Impact: High
Effort to fix: Low
Issue code: backlinked_broken

Why it matters

Other websites link to this page but it returns an error, so the value of those backlinks is lost and visitors from those sites hit a dead end.

How to fix it

Restore the page or 301 redirect it to the most relevant live page. On a competitor site, contact the linking sites and suggest your equivalent page instead.

How it affects your score

Finding this issue on any page costs the Internal Linking score 8 points, plus up to 25 more depending on the share of crawled pages affected. As a critical issue type it also takes 3 points off overall site health (critical deductions stop at 15 points). Blocks indexing, breaks pages or loses traffic. Fix these first.

Find the affected URLs

Open Crawl > Issues and pick Broken page with backlinks. Each affected URL is listed with its evidence, and Copy URLs or Export URLs hands the list to a developer. The issue also appears in the Action Plan, ranked by impact (high) and effort (low), and in the issues CSV under the code backlinked_broken. After fixing, run a new audit and use Compare to confirm the URLs moved to fixed.

Guides that cover this issue

Import backlinks from Search Console, Ahrefs or Semrush