Broken links (external or internal)

Does Google penalise a site with too many?

[directrix]

I'm sure this question has been asked before, but... does Google penalise a site if there are "too many" broken links? If so, does Google differentiate between a lot of broken external links, and broken internal links?

[g1smd]

It is hard to know, but one measure of "site quality" may be the percentage of broken links - and the trend of an ever increasing number, versus a small but fluctuating amount as links break and are deleted or fixed, then some more break... and so on.

The large number that is constantly increasing, may indicate an untended site. What it says about the quality of other content on the page/site is unknown; but not worth taking the risk over.

Use Xenu LinkSleuth, perhaps every few months, to find links on your site that are broken. Then delete or fix them.

[glengara]

Not sure about sites, but I suspect pages could well be affected, hopefully I'll have a better idea in the near future ;-)

I had a number of pages in the top 10 that have gradually sunk in the SERPs, I looked at them the other day for the first time in over a year and discovered just about every outgoing link was either 404 or redirecting.

The on-page stuff was still OK, and the competition has increased, but not enough to warrant such a steep decline, IMO.

Anyway, I've deleted all the bad links, and otherwise made only minor adjustments, so it'll be interesting to see if they come back up....

[directrix]

Thanks guys.

I run the W3C link checker periodically, but I was surprised recently to find quite a few dead links, and wondered at possible consequences. Obviously, it's annoying for visitors!

glengara, by "redirecting" do you mean a 301? Presumably a "302" is not a problem?

[glengara]

*..do you mean a 301?*

I didn't check to be honest, either way it just didn't look good.....