<b>Internal 404 Link-Equity Recovery</b>

<b>Internal 404 Link-Equity Recovery</b>
Before hunting external broken links, recover the equity bleeding inside your own site.

1. Crawl your domain; export all internal links resolving to 404.
2. For each, check if an external site links to that dead URL (your own backlink export).
3. Decision per URL:
— Strong backlinks exist: 301 the dead URL to the closest live page.
— No backlinks: fix or remove the internal link only.
4. Never blanket-redirect everything to the homepage — it dilutes relevance.
5. Automation fits at step 1: scheduled monthly crawl with a 404 diff report.

Definition of done: every 404'd URL with inbound links has a relevance-matched 301 and the crawl shows zero broken internal links.