Google rewards link maintenance?

[Bentler]

A few months ago I did routine link maintenance on a themed section of an experiment site, to rid it of link rot. Now G ranks the main page on this them #1 over several other authority sites, up from #2 or 3 out, of 54 million pages.

A short term stumbleupon spike took place a few months back, causing a temporary rise, but that traffic effect dampened quickly and I doubt it fed the rank I see now.

Rewarding link maintenence with higher rank would seem to make sense as it would create competition to produce better-connected content and create incentive to reduce link graph storage and processing costs.

[Quadrille]

I'm sure you're right; Google has always rewarded good site navigation, and link maintenance is a key part of that.

Plus link maintenance likely reduces any penalties due to inadvertent bad neighbourhoods due to decayed links.

[Bentler]

Maybe they've started applying RotRank to pages and sites as a quality metric. Regardless, it appears to be well worth the time to clean up those broken and redirected links.

I've come to like the W3C's old link checker at [validator.w3.org...] -- provides pretty good standards-based info about each link on a page, including who's hiding pages from search bots or redirecting to a code 200 File not Found page.