After reading the original posts on here, I decided to download that Xenu and scan a few of my sites. I have some very old sites that have thousands of pages. I found a NIGHTMARE of 404 errors of missing JPG's or JPG's in wrong directories and links to tons of external sites to companies that are went out of business or were down or what have you.

I worked until 3 AM fixing like 99% of the errors on two of the sites with help from the Xenu program. The very next day I checked my two sites and one of them went up 11 notches on Google just from the tons of fixes alone. WOW! I had no idea how badly I was being penalized from all of those bad links. I went from the page 3 to the top of page 2 in one day just from the link fixes.

Apparently bad links slow Google's crawler down and they must not like that.

I've been scanning web sites from every friend I know trying to tell them to fix their links now. It hurts all of us as a whole to make the crawlers take longer to scan sites.

I'm so glad I found the conversation regarding this issue. Thanks for bringing it up. I'm sure my visitors will also appreciate it when they go to click on links and 100% of them work now with no errors. I'm sure Google doesn't want to send visitors to a web page that has a bunch of dead links also.