Broken links, "decayed" links

Effect on rankings; tools for measuring "decay"; associated Qs

[suidas]

What is the current thinking on how much search engines, especially Google, punish sites with broken links? For example, is it about number, percentage, or is it split between effects for internal and external links? For example, if pages go dead at a rate of .25%-.5% a week, I would think an "authority" site would have trouble keeping up. Given that link-checking has to happen from time to time, does it pay to have some sort of *automated link removal* program?

In this connection, has anyone read 2004 WWW Conference paper "Sic Transit Gloria Telae: Towards an Understanding of the Web’s Decay" by Ziv Bar-Yossef et alii? (URL: [wwwconf.ecs.soton.ac.uk...] It presents a concept of "decay" richer than "are there broken links." For example, although Yahoo gets rid of broken links almost immediately, their directory links to many pages which *themselves* link to broken pages, or reside in "neighborhoods" with high concentrations of broken links. They also have good ideas about detecting soft failures, broken pages where you don't get a 404.

Last question. Has anyone observed how Googlebot deals with dead pages? Does it try again every time it spiders the site, or does it stop trying?

[uncle_bob]

Were you attempting to be ironic, posting a question on link rot, that contains a broken link, or was it just a typo? Perhaps the ')' at the end of the url was a mistake?

[suidas]

:) Yes, chop off the parenthesis.

[suidas]

The Google forum started talking about associated issues here

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