Forum Moderators: phranque
Would it be reasonable to assume that dead links in a website are probably in G's algo? Is is one more variable?
Hard to say, but there are certainly a lot of dead sites around that continue to rank well for less competitive phrases. A lot of these links point to pages that say "This site is closing, it's been fun but it was too much work", rather than just 404's.
Cleaning out dead links may be indirectly good for your ranking, because there are only so many search engine positions for a given phrase, and you want them to go to live sites such as your own. I don't know that it would harm your site to have a high percentage of dead links. I've never seen any evidence of this but if SE's factored it into their algos it would be a good way to weed out stale sites. So if they're not doing it now, maybe they should in future.
How often do you find pages with lots of dead links near the top of the SERPs? I haven't seen those in years. I find pages littered with dead links all the time *when I get to the page by following a link from another website*, but not from finding them in the SERPs.
I remember years ago I was miffed that I site ranked above me in Yahoo (this was before Google took over), and that site was 90% dead links, and almost no content. I couldn't get the other webmaster to either update his site or take it down. The engines eventually took care of the problem -- his site eventually took a dive in the SERPs.
I religiously scan my pages, and fix DLs or weed them out.
- Larry
