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

[Simon Young]

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

[Simon Young]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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...