Fixing 1,900 internal links to 404s: crawl efficiency +14pts

Fixing 1,900 internal links to 404s: crawl efficiency +14pts

Docs portal after a restructure. Crawl found 1,900 internal links pointing to dead URLs (8.7% of all internal links).

Crawl requests hitting 404 ▓▓░░░░░░░░ 17% of daily volume

Googlebot kept re-following the broken links, burning budget on guaranteed misses.

We rewrote the links to live targets and added 301s where a successor existed.

Delta over 4 weeks:
— Daily crawl requests hitting 404: 17% → 3%
— Crawl efficiency (2xx share): 79% → 93% (↑14pts)
— Median re-crawl interval on live docs: 14d → 9d

so what: 404s from internal links are self-inflicted budget waste — the crawler only finds them because you keep linking them. Internal-link hygiene is a crawl-efficiency lever, not just a UX one.