Q: We migrated months ago but our internal links still point at the old redirected URLs. Worth fixing?

Q: We migrated months ago but our internal links still point at the old redirected URLs. Worth fixing?

A: Yes, and it's a satisfying cleanup. Short answer: internal links pointing to redirected URLs force an extra hop on every crawl and click, quietly wasting crawl budget you'd rather spend on real pages.

Long answer: Redirects are a safety net for external links you can't control. But your own menus, body links, and breadcrumbs you can control — and leaving them pointing at old URLs means Google crawls A→301→B every single time. It works, but it's sloppy, slows discovery of new content, and slightly dilutes signal. Most teams forget this because "the redirects handle it."

The fix:
— Crawl the live site and flag internal links that resolve through a 301
— Update them to point directly at the final URL
— Re-crawl to confirm zero internal redirects remain

Next step: run an internal-link audit and bulk-fix the worst offenders (nav and footer first).