How Broken Links Affect SEO: Crawl Budget, User Experience, and Link Equity

Broken links negatively affect SEO by reducing crawl efficiency, wasting crawl budget, harming user experience, and causing loss of link equity. Search engines allocate a limited crawl budget to each website, which is the number of pages their bots will crawl during a visit. When bots encounter broken links, they waste time crawling dead ends instead of valuable content, which slows down indexing of new or updated pages and can hinder SEO growth.

From a user experience perspective, broken links lead to frustration and loss of trust, as visitors encounter error pages instead of the expected content. This can increase bounce rates and reduce user engagement, signaling to search engines that the site is poorly maintained or unreliable, which can further damage rankings.

Regarding link equity, broken links fail to pass on "link juice" from high-quality external or internal links. This loss of link equity diminishes the authority and ranking potential of your website because the value that should be transferred through these links is lost.

In summary, broken links affect SEO by:

• Wasting crawl budget: Bots spend resources on non-existent pages, reducing the crawl frequency of important pages.
• Damaging user experience: Users encounter dead ends, leading to frustration and decreased trust.
• Losing link equity: Broken links do not pass ranking power, weakening site authority.

Regularly auditing and fixing broken links by updating or redirecting them is essential to maintain SEO health and improve both crawl efficiency and user satisfaction.