Do Broken Links Hurt SEO?

What Google says, and what broken links actually cost you.

1. Google has said 404s alone don’t cause a penalty, but they waste crawl budget and throw away link equity.
2. Broken internal links stop authority flowing to important pages.
3. Broken outbound links signal a neglected page to visitors.
4. Backlinks pointing at deleted pages lose all their value unless you redirect them.
5. The biggest cost is often lost conversions, not lost rankings.

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