Does having a few broken links in your site cause a ban?

[mryang]

Hi,

Does having a few broken links in a site cause you to be excluded from certain search engines? I recently got a copy of Xenu and checked my site and found 50 odd broken links in several thousand pages.

These broken links included
Outbound links to sites that have since dissapeared and gave 404 page not founds
Some mistyped internal links again giving 404's
Some jpg and gif images which were missing
Some 12029 no connection errors to external sites


So I am now working my way though correcting these, however the question remains that is there a percentage of links in your site which are broken that is acceptable (like 0.05% for example) or are there some of the search engines and directories that will exclude you for having one single broken link???

[mjtaylor]

A ban, no. A lower ranking, yes. I would say aim for no broken links whatsoever. I don't think one or two will stop you from being in most directories, but if a DMOZ editor found even one, they might use that to reject your site.

Cheers. MJ

[mryang]

I was in DMOZ but now am not, so trying to find out why I have been removed and starting from the ground up.

[mjtaylor]

Originally Posted by mryang

I was in DMOZ but now am not, so trying to find out why I have been removed and starting from the ground up.

Does the category where your site was listed have an active editor? If so, they may regularly check sites and if they found a lot of broken links they could have removed you ...

[incrediblehelp]

Anything that can imped the crawlers can potential effect your websites positioning in the SERPs

[phx-keith]

Broken links surely do not help things. I had a site I continually changed and had numerous broken links. I finally put up a fresh website and did my SEO and in just 6 months I'm where I wanted to be on the search engines and I'm a PR4.

I do not believe page rank has anything to do with ranking. I think broken links effect PR and to a lesser degree ranking.

[sensei]

I had a site with a few broken links and I got penalized. All of a sudden, the site dissapeared from the SERPs and when I went to check out what could have been the reasons, I found those broken links.

It's common sense in my opinion for Google and other search engines that a site with many broken links is a neglected site thus Google will treat it the same way.

Better spend some time... from time to time to check your links and avoid getting penalized for this. I learned this from self experience.

[jtracking]

Originally Posted by mjtaylor

A ban, no. A lower ranking, yes. I would say aim for no broken links whatsoever. I don't think one or two will stop you from being in most directories, but if a DMOZ editor found even one, they might use that to reject your site.

Cheers. MJ

Hey MJT...

I'll have to disagree reMOZ and even the lower ranking...that would all depend on the overall relativity of the site. In other words if in the search engines eyes the site is pretty decent with respect to content and navigation etc. then a broken link wouldn't affect the site much in any regard, maybe after a very prolonged period of time the issue wasn't resolved then I could see that page being dropped but if the rest of the site still kicks then it still kicks, if the site bites then that broken link my just contribute to the overall terrible ranking or SER.

There was a posting yesturday where the poster mentioned that for their keywords, in google the top site was actually a dead-non-existent page.

Go figure.

[jtracking]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

Anything that can imped the crawlers can potential effect your websites positioning in the SERPs

Now I can agree with this cause this is true. Anything but if you have so many pages, up in the thousands I don't think broken links will get you banned from anywhere...it couldn't be in the business model to ban sites that have errors on them...but again, as I agreed, the potential is there but in my opinion it won't be just and only because of broken links. There must be more...

[jtracking]

Originally Posted by sensei

I had a site with a few broken links and I got penalized. All of a sudden, the site dissapeared from the SERPs and when I went to check out what could have been the reasons, I found those broken links.

It's common sense in my opinion for Google and other search engines that a site with many broken links is a neglected site thus Google will treat it the same way.

Better spend some time... from time to time to check your links and avoid getting penalized for this. I learned this from self experience.

I currently work for a firm that has about 300 pages plus and from the time I started until today there are about 40 broken links AND we're still listed in each of the major search engines...and still ranking on the first and second page for the miriad of keywords we're competing for...

[opalcomp]

You would be ranking even higher without the errors.

[Concept Interest]

Broken links decrease user experience thus decreasing site value. I'm sure that Google and other engines will take the number of broken links into consideration when ranking.

[Linknz]

Well for our part in this your website wouldn't be penalised at all for having broken links, our New Zealand based engine wouldn't mark your website down for a few broken links, you couldn't be expected to keep up with any sites you link to that go off line so we would maybe send you an email to inform you of the links we found that were broken and that would be about it.

It is the sites content that matters to us and not a sites links.

All the best
Dave Andrews
from LinkNZ

[Coqui Colunge]

Originally Posted by Concept Interest

Broken links decrease user experience thus decreasing site value. I'm sure that Google and other engines will take the number of broken links into consideration when ranking.

Couldn't agree more. It's so obvious I wonder why some people just don't see it.

Just my humble opinion

Coqui.

[mjtaylor]

Originally Posted by jtracking

Hey MJT...

I'll have to disagree reMOZ and even the lower ranking...that would all depend on the overall relativity of the site. In other words if in the search engines eyes the site is pretty decent with respect to content and navigation etc. then a broken link wouldn't affect the site much in any regard, maybe after a very prolonged period of time the issue wasn't resolved then I could see that page being dropped but if the rest of the site still kicks then it still kicks, if the site bites then that broken link my just contribute to the overall terrible ranking or SER.

There was a posting yesturday where the poster mentioned that for their keywords, in google the top site was actually a dead-non-existent page.

Go figure.

I appreciate your difference of opinion, but I have seen sites dropped from DMOZ because of broken links and similar quality issues.

And I have cleaned up inherited sites with broken links (more than one or two) and seen them improve in SERPs with no other changes.

Originally Posted by jtracking

I currently work for a firm that has about 300 pages plus and from the time I started until today there are about 40 broken links AND we're still listed in each of the major search engines...and still ranking on the first and second page for the miriad of keywords we're competing for...

You're in a perfect position to test it then ... fix your broken links and see if your position improves. I'm sure I can't imagine why those broken links are still there when you know about them.

[kgun]

Broken links, especially affiliates, are a night mare, but I sit in a glass house

[coolguy27]

Agree, you must monitor your site if it has broken links... as what she says it will affect the rankings and what the directories rules when submitting that your site must not have broken links or a underconstruction site.

Originally Posted by mjtaylor

A ban, no. A lower ranking, yes. I would say aim for no broken links whatsoever. I don't think one or two will stop you from being in most directories, but if a DMOZ editor found even one, they might use that to reject your site.

Cheers. MJ

[jtracking]

Originally Posted by mjtaylor

I appreciate your difference of opinion, but I have seen sites dropped from DMOZ because of broken links and similar quality issues.

And I have cleaned up inherited sites with broken links (more than one or two) and seen them improve in SERPs with no other changes.



You're in a perfect position to test it then ... fix your broken links and see if your position improves. I'm sure I can't imagine why those broken links are still there when you know about them.

Good call, I just thought about that. The amount of work it will take to complete this task in one shot overwhelms other responsibilities - I'm on it!

I actually believe as well that our site's sers will increase but I don't think we're penalized.

[mjtaylor]

Originally Posted by jtracking

Good call, I just thought about that. The amount of work it will take to complete this task in one shot overwhelms other responsibilities - I'm on it!

I actually believe as well that our site's sers will increase but I don't think we're penalized.

It would be very cool if you did that; it is so rare that we really get to know what is truly helpful or harmful ... be sure to let us know a couple of your "pre-clean up" positions and when the links are corrected .... thank you!!!! And you're right, your users will thank you even if the SEs don't.

[weegillis]

Link Check Your Sites--LinkAlarm costs a penny a page.

Website Validation and Monitoring--SEVENtwentyfour is very comprehensive and very reliable. Their fees vary, depending on site size, but their service never does. Our experience with this company was outstanding. Their robot, Linkwalker, makes regular crawls, both internal and external, and alerts their customer immediately of dead links, possible cause, possible replacement url and all pages affected. SEVENtwentyfour also alerts you of pages on your site that others are linking to that may have been removed, or relocated. Then you know who to contact with the correct link. A real lifesaver. On the one hand, we hated to see their e-mail (it meant more work) but we also relished in its arrival (it meant we knew what to fix).

Google Webmaster Tools will also alert you of any links it has trouble following, and give a reason, if known, such as 'restricted by robots.txt.'

If you know of sites that are preventing SE bots from crawling, then you have only to check manually, or just don't link to them.

As to your original question, I agree with those who feel that dead links won't get you banned. If this were the case, there would be a fraction of pages compared to the billions currently indexed. Does the quality of your site affect ranking? We must certainly believe it does. A well managed site does not have many broken links, whereas a poorly managed one usually has a few, or a lot. As the site breaks down, its content degrades. No amount of SEO will get higher rankings if the site is broken.

One cause of link breakage in many sites is deep linking to expired pages on other sites. When we link directly to content on someone else's site we should expect problems down the road.

[z28com]

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.

[Clarrie]

I'm not convinced that the search engines penalise broken links, but they might impact on PageRank and results. We use a combination of different tools to check for broken links, but Google Webmaster tools is not a bad place to check in the first instance.

[mjtaylor]

Originally Posted by Clarrie

I'm not convinced that the search engines penalise broken links, but they might impact on PageRank and results. We use a combination of different tools to check for broken links, but Google Webmaster tools is not a bad place to check in the first instance.

Broken links do not affect PageRank; and you are right to suggest there is not a penalty, per se, for broken links, but as z28com and others have experienced (and as you say) they *do* affect a web site's position in the SERPs.
Good point on Webmaster Tools, as well.

Cheers, MJ

[z28com]

Originally Posted by Clarrie

I'm not convinced that the search engines penalise broken links, but they might impact on PageRank and results. We use a combination of different tools to check for broken links, but Google Webmaster tools is not a bad place to check in the first instance.

You are dead wrong. I fixed hundreds of broken links on two sites and both of them shot up right after fixing them. I did not add or edit any of the content on these sites in over a year. All I did was use Xenu to scan for broken links and I removed all of the links to invalid web sites and corrected all of the links to broken graphics. Prior to that, the web site was slowly tanking down the ranks down to page 3 and then shot up to the top of page 2 on Google immediately after repairing the links.

[Journey]

Definitely, it's not. But broken links can give your site a bad impression form your online visitors... Thus, they will not come back again to your site..

[z28com]

Yep. Not having broken links shows the search engines that you take the time to maintain your site and keep it up to date. Google uses a very large scoring system and fixing broken links is only part of the algorithm.

That Xenu software works pretty good to detect broken links and is free.