Broken Links Penalty

Penalty for Broken Links

[zuko105]

What is the penalty for broken links?

I have just cleaned up my link directory on my site and cleared out about 200+ links.

Lets say that Google had crawled my entire site before I cleaned this up. Is it possible that I could have been penalized or dropped in PR because of the broken links?

Thanks in advance.

Zuko

[Emma McCreary]

i've never heard of a penalty for broken links. google penalizes if you break their terms of service and/or if you try to unfairly make your pagerank or rankings higher.

broken links may make your site less usable, but they wouldn't affect your rankings so i don't think google would penalize you for it. IMHO.

[SEO practioner]

Emma and zuko, that is exactly how I understand it too.

Of course, nobody wants any broken links on any of their sites, but who doesn't every once in a while? Accidents will happen...

But Google will only penalize a site if somebody violates their TOS.

SEO

[zuko105]

Ok 'penalty' might have been a harsh word.

how about a lower page rank?

Zuko

[Mohamed_E]

No, neither penalty nor reduced page rank.

GoogGoogle wants to know whether you have relevant content, and whether you are deceiving it. It does not (currently) care about other aspects of the quality of your pages.

[zuko105]

I like that 'currently' Mohamed_E

I wish that Google could start concentrating more on the quality of sites rather than Spam sites.

Zuko

[Emma McCreary]

zuko, it seems to me like detecting quality of a site would be a hard thing for google to do fairly. how would you suggest they rate sites for quality?

[Mohamed_E]

I have no idea how to measure the quality of a site objectively, but I do know that Google employs many people who are far smarter than I am :)

I assume that at some stage they will (without telling us, of course) implement a "quality of site" rating. No evidence that they are doing it yet, but I am sure that it is coming.

[pixel_juice]

Some thoughts:

Sites with less broken links generally have more technically competent webmasters, but don't necessarily have better content. Also the larger your site gets and the more content it has, the harder it becomes to administer and catch all broken links.

Finally, Google has cached versions of pages which it visits, even if there are no links to them on the site in question, or I might link to a site that goes offline before I get a chance to notice. These returns 404s, but how would Googlebot differentiate between these links and links that are broken because of sloppiness?

[victor]

I don't know what the penalty for a broken link is, but in Google's quality guidelines "Check for broken links and correct HTML" is explicitly mentioned.

[google.com...]

And, as they say: "Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site, which is the best way to ensure you'll be included in Google's results"

[pixel_juice]

I think 'index' is the important part of that sentence. If your links are broken, then google won't be able to index you.

A penalty for this would be totally unjustifiable. I could find you over 100 broken links on microsoft.com for example. Does this mean the website should be penalised? I have clicked on 404s in Google's serps on a number of occasions.

[zuko105]

The broken links for my site were in my directory that I provide (topical and relevant directory, not a ffa link db).

So they were external links, not internal.....please....

jk.

Zuko

[pixel_juice]

So they were external links, not internal.....please...

I've never seen any evidence that Google thinks there's a difference between the two. A link's a link.