Forum Moderators: phranque
If you mean broken links then it's not a good thing to have anyway!
Not sure whether an intelligent search engine would apply a "lost cause" logic to a site that was full of 404's or not; I doubt it, but that's not saying they don't.
It could be considered a waste of time to continue spidering a site that was 404 after 404, so I would certainly not go there if I were you.
<anecdotal evidence>A local party site that I run was suddently very much down in Google after the beginning-of-January update this year. I loked all over the site for clues - nothing that could be viewed as hidden text, cloaking etc. The only things that were faulty in a major way were some pages where I had archived the 'events' and 'links' content from 1996 onward - of course a lot of the external links were dead by now. As a stopgap measure I included these pages as disallows in robots.txt - from the next update on the site was in Google's good graces again.</anecdotal evidence>
Can too many 404's on a website cause any indexing issues? Do the search engines frown upon them?
One 404 is one too many.
Doesn't everyone frown upon 404s?
If you move pages that are indexed then you have no choice but to wait for the spiders to come and update the index, but there's no excuse for broken links!
> One 404 is one too many.
A pint for you if we meet, sir.
It is simply *so* much easier to use the "controls" built into HTTP and into web servers to "do it right the first time" and not have to deal with all the secondary effects!
I will forgive 404's from "confused" and buggy search engine spiders, but if the 404 is my fault, I feel quite derelict in my duty to present a professional Web site to my visitors.
MHO/YMMV,
Jim
