Links to other sites that now return a 4XX error, such as 404 Not Found or 410 Gone, send visitors to dead pages and make your content look out of date.
Why Joomla sites get it
This is ordinary link rot: other sites reorganise, rename or remove pages. Older articles are affected most, because nobody rechecks their links.
Fix it by hand
- Find the dead links; on a large site that needs a crawler.
- Replace each with the page’s new address, a good alternative or an archived copy, or remove the link.
Fix it with MetaGen
MetaGen’s site scan requests every outbound link in your published articles. The External links 4XX row lists those returning a 4XX error, with the articles that contain them. A site that answers 429 Too Many Requests is refusing the check rather than broken, so MetaGen lists it separately as not checked instead of counting it.
MetaGen is free for Joomla 5 and 6. See all the SEO warnings MetaGen checks.
