A link to one of your own pages that returns an error, usually 404 Not Found, is a dead end for visitors and wastes the search engine’s time on your site.
Why Joomla sites get it
Internal links in Joomla break when the article they point at is unpublished, trashed or given a new alias, when menus or categories are reorganised so the URL changes, or when a link was typed as a full URL instead of being inserted as a link to the article.
Fix it by hand
- Insert links to other articles with the editor’s article link button rather than pasting URLs. Joomla then builds the URL for you, and it keeps working if the article moves.
- When you move or rename a page, add a redirect from the old URL in the Redirects component. With Collect URLs switched on in the System – Redirect plugin, it records the 404s visitors hit so you can redirect them.
- Edit or remove links to pages that are gone for good.
Fix it with MetaGen
MetaGen’s site scan requests every link from your published articles to your own site. The Broken internal links row lists each one that returns an error, with the articles that contain it and a link to edit them.
MetaGen is free for Joomla 5 and 6. See all the SEO warnings MetaGen checks.
