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 out of my several thousand pages.

 

These broken links included the following -

 

Outbound links to sites that have since dissapeared and gave 404 page not founds

Mistyped internal links again giving 404's

Some .jpg and .gif images which were missing

Some 12029 no connection errors to external sites

 

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???

I can't see it helping but whether they would ban you for it I doubt.

 

The worst thing of all is it will really p*ss your users off.

yup you should always maintain your site and make sure that there are no broken links, as all it will do is reflect badly on you, especially if you are selling something through the site. So even if it doesn't affect the search engines it could still do a lot more harm to your sales, because even if their is one broken link why would someone trust the site? It just shows that its not being maintained the way it should be.

Google devalues sites with over 2% broken links, I believe it starts seriously affecting page indexing after the 6% mark

Google devalues sites with over 2% broken links, I believe it starts seriously affecting page indexing after the 6% mark

That's interesting... have you got a source for that statistic Neurotoxin? Thanks

 

I would say that perhaps anything that says a site has fallen into disrepair is a signal to a directory or a search engine that you are not so 'alive'. I wonder whether there's any history of an editor at DMOZ doing this...

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 out of my several thousand pages.

 

These broken links included the following -

 

Outbound links to sites that have since dissapeared and gave 404 page not founds

Mistyped internal links again giving 404's

Some .jpg and .gif images which were missing

Some 12029 no connection errors to external sites

 

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???

 

I think broken links do not make your site be banned from search engines.. Having broken links form your site would give bad impression from your online visitors. As a result, they will not visit again your site if ever they need information and resources related to your theme..

There must be an acceptable level of broken links as you have no control if an extrenal site you are linking too is down... So I suppose the up to 2% may be acceptable, but I would imagine it is alot lower than that say 0.5%

based on my experienced you didn't get ban in search engines only because the broken links!

Surely the more important aspect of broken links is your customer's online experience? If they find lots of broken links (or any at all for that matter) any goodwill or confidence you've built up with that customer is shattered.

 

What reason is there for them to stay on that site if it doesn't do what they want?

None, but thats a usability issue and this is the SEO section of the forum