Digital marketing term
Dead Link
A URL that no longer returns the resource, often as a 404 or a timeout. They collect in menus, emails, and body copy and quietly tax both crawl and trust.
Detailed explanation
They appear after a move, a killed campaign, or an external source shutting down. Footers and old posts accumulate them without anyone noticing. The visitor never gets the promised page; search engines treat that edge as weak.
Leaving a bare 404 on a URL people still hit, or 302-ing everything to the homepage, are the usual bad fixes. Permanent moves need a 301; true removals need a clear 404 and a useful next step. Patching only when someone complains lets the backlog grow.
Watch broken-link count, clicks that land on 404, and crawl errors. Repair high-value URLs first—the ones with traffic or inbound links. Decide to redirect, merge, or restore. Do not delete at random.
Frequently asked questions
- Is a 404 always a failure?
- It is the right answer for a URL that should not exist. The failure is a 404 on a page people still request or other sites still cite.
- Should every miss go to the homepage?
- No. Unrelated 301s confuse people and dilute ranking signals. Point to the matching replacement URL.
Related terms
Internal links for the topic cluster — read these concepts together.
- URLThe full address a browser opens: scheme, host, and path in one string. People share it, crawlers fetch it, and analytics treat it as a page — canonical choice should pin signals to one address.
- RedirectAn HTTP response that sends browsers and crawlers from one URL to another; permanent (301) and temporary (302/307) codes do different jobs. Broken pages, moved content, and short campaign paths all use this mechanism.
- 301 RedirectAn HTTP response that tells browsers and crawlers a URL has moved for good, and the new address should replace it. Use it for migrations, HTTPS, and retired pages that have a real equivalent.
- SEOSEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the set of technical and content practices that help a website rank more visibly in organic search results.
- External LinkA link from your page to a different hostname. Use it to cite a source or send someone deeper—not as a ranking trick or a farm of outbound URLs that add noise.
- Inbound LinksLinks on other websites that point to your pages—the same idea as backlinks. Links between your own URLs are internal links and do not count as inbound.