Don’t forget to redirect broken inbound links!
These are external links pointing to a page on your site that no longer exists.
This can happen in various ways…
- During a site migration/redesign, information architecture changes but redirect mapping is done poorly.
- Marketers switched plugins in their CMS, affecting client-side redirects.
- Developers removed server-side redirects.
- The other site made a mistake.
However they occur, it’s rare to not find at least some backlinks, for any site, to old pages that had earned decent authority.
You can’t find these by crawling your own site though, making them easy to overlook. You can use an SEO tool like Ahrefs to pick many of these up. You can also use GA4 to see accessed URLs leading to your 404 error page.
Every backlink is a vote for your site’s worth, so it’s sensible to preserve these. It also ensures that visitors see a relevant page on your site if they click that link.