Page Has Links to a Broken Page (Outgoing)

What’s actually happening

The audit tool flags the source page itself, not the destination. The page renders fine, but it contains links — internal, external, or both — that go nowhere. Users clicking those links hit 404s on your site or someone else's, and search engines read a page full of dead outbound links as a sign of low maintenance.

Common causes

• External sites you link to deleted or moved their content (link rot) — common on resource pages and old blog posts
• Internal links to pages you've since removed or restructured
• A linked third-party domain expired or changed its URL structure entirely
• Affiliate or partner URLs that were deprecated when the program changed
• Anchor links or PDFs/downloads (href to a file) that were removed from the server but still referenced

How to fix it

1. List the specific broken outbound links on the pageIn Screaming Frog, crawl the site, select the source URL, and check 'Outlinks' filtered by status code. Semrush's 'Broken external links' and 'Broken internal links' reports both name the source page and each dead target.
2. Triage each dead linkInternal targets: repoint to the correct live URL or remove the link. External targets: find the page's new home (try the site's search or the Wayback Machine at web.archive.org), update the URL, or replace it with a current equivalent source.
3. Remove links you can't repairIf an external resource is gone for good and has no replacement, delete the hyperlink (keep the text if it still reads well). A dead link helps no one; unlinking is better than leaving a 404.
4. For external links, add monitoringExternal link rot is ongoing — you don't control those sites. Schedule a recurring crawl or use a link-checker so new breakages surface within weeks, not on the next annual audit.