Find broken links.
Fix them fast.

Not all broken links cost you the same thing

A link checker will hand you a list of failures. The list is only useful once you separate the kinds, because they have genuinely different consequences and two of them are not worth your afternoon.

Internal links to 404s are the ones that matter most. You control both ends, so there is no excuse, and every one of them wastes a crawl and dead-ends a visitor. They also strand whatever authority was flowing through that link.

Soft 404s are more dangerous because they are invisible in a status-code report. The page returns HTTP 200 while the content says "product not found" or shows an empty results template. Search engines have to guess, they usually guess correctly and drop the page, and you never see a red row anywhere. Empty category pages and discontinued product URLs are the usual culprits.

Redirect chains resolve to a working page, so they never appear as broken, but each hop adds latency for the visitor and consumes crawl budget. A chain more than a couple of hops deep is worth flattening to a single redirect.

External links that have rotted are the lowest priority. They are a credibility and user-experience problem rather than a technical one, and beyond a certain site size you will never fully win, because other people keep changing their URLs without telling you.

The part people get wrong

Google has been explicit that 404s are a normal part of the web and do not inherently harm your rankings. Deleted pages are supposed to return 404. The instinct to bulk-redirect every dead URL to the homepage is actively counterproductive: it creates soft 404s at scale and tells search engines your homepage is the answer to hundreds of unrelated queries.

Redirect a dead URL when there is a genuine equivalent. Let it 404 when there is not. Fix the internal links either way, since those are the ones you are responsible for.

How UtilitySEO handles this

Link and crawl issues surface inside the site audit alongside everything else, ranked by impact rather than listed alphabetically, so internal failures come before rotted outbound references to somebody else's blog.