Pick 'fixing your broken internal links' instead of picking 'buying expensive ex
By Michael Erickson Facchin · May 1, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Pick 'fixing your broken internal links' instead of picking 'buying expensive external backlinks'.
Agree or disagree?
Leave it in the comments.
I was talking to a founder this weekend and they told me about this terrible experience they had with their SEO agency.
They were spending thousands of dollars every month hunting down external authority, obsessing over the "cost of buying links" like the article shown in the screenshot above.
Yet, when I ran a simple crawl on their site, I found hundreds of broken internal links. Every time a user or a Google search bot clicked a contextual link inside their own content, they hit a dead-end 404 page.
They were pouring expensive traffic into a bucket with a massive hole in the bottom.
It's demotivating for a user to hit a broken link when they are trying to learn more about your product. It destroys your crawl budget, ruins the user experience, and halts your sales velocity in its tracks.
Here's what I've come to learn over the years... you cannot build a skyscraper on a fractured foundation.
I think a website with average external links but a flawless internal linking structure is better than a website with great external links that is completely broken on the inside.
I'm curious what do you think ?