If people link to you incorrectly, does it hurt you?
-
In Google WM tools I'm seeing so many 404 crawl errors but they're all from other sites linking to us incorrectly, which I can't do anything about. Will this hurt us somehow as far as SEO goes?
The logical thing would be that it would hurt the site doiing the linking but it does come up in OUR WM tools, so it makes me wonder.
-
I think everyone hit this on the head but I had one quick point to drop. It might be good to search over the sites as well to look at the most valued sites that are linking to you with 404 errors. I would try to then reach out to them personally and ask if they could update the link. You often can get a specific anchor text or a link to a page deeper within your website.
Good luck with it!
-
Generally speaking, inbound links can't hurt you. Websites link to each other all the time and websites move or remove content all the time. 404s hurt if your own site if you are linking to bad URLs because you're wasting crawl budget.
-
Thanks so much!
-
LOL,
I knew I saw it...
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/set-it-and-forget-it-seo-chasing-the-elusive-passive-seo-dream
A script engine created by virante based off of Levenshtein Distance, also known as the Edit Distance
-
No they won't hurt you, but setup redirects for them.
-
Thanks for all the responses. Of course, I thought of the redirect route, but there are hundreds of wrong links, so I was trying to avoid the 301 thing. I am the webmaster, so if anyone does remember what that script was, that's be great!
-
If you've got inbound link to non-existent pages then set up 301 redirects to the most relevant page. At the moment any link-juice you could be receiving form these links is being wasted.
Broken links won't hurt you - you just won't get the benefits!
-
You can help this!
You can use the data from WM tools to create 301 redirects on your site that will direct these incorrect queries to the correct page, preserving more of the authority than letting it fall off with a 404
There was actually a post recently (4 or 5 months ago) about doing this automatically using a server side script that actually "fixes" it for you automatically. But it is pretty advanced, and if you aren't dealing with thousands of them, might be easier to do yourself (or have your webmaster take care of) (I was not able to find or remember what it was called, maybe someone else will)
If this is just PDF documents and Files that have been picked up by scrapers, I personally don't worry about these so much, but someone may disagree with that
w00t!
-
I'm not sure if it can hurt you, however you can redirect their bad links to working pages with 301 redirects.
example: I link to your site with yousite.com/paeg.html (misstyped on purpose) but your page is actually located at yoursite.com/page.html
In this case create a 301 redirect to point from /paeg.html to /page.html and you will get people coming to the right place.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Referencing links in Articles and Blogs
Hi I am wondering if the <sup>tag in html is picked up by google as a reference point?</sup> I.e when you put a superscript in word it puts a small number next to your sentence. Then you have a list of reference at the end of the blog/article does google recognise this?
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Site-wide Links
Hey y'all, I know this question has been asked many times before but I wanted to see what your stance was on this particular case. The organisation I work for is a group of 12 companies - each with its own website. On some of the sites we have a link to the other sites within the group on every single page of that site. Our organic search traffic has dropped a bit but not significantly and we haven't received any manual penalties from Google. It's also worth mentioning that the referral traffic for these sites from the other sites I control is quite good and the bounce rate is extremely low. If you were in my shoes would you remove the links, put a nofollow tag on the links or leave the links as they are? Thanks guys 🙂
Technical SEO | | AAttias0 -
Hot Linking
We recently noticed that our website www.efurniturehouse.com is being hot linked by axsoris.com a Dutch website with many malware issue. Any suggestions how to proceed? Thanks in advance Tony
Technical SEO | | OCFurniture1 -
Footer Links with same anchor text on all pages
We have different websites targeted at the different services our company provides. (e.g. For our document storage services, we have www.ukdocumentstorage.com. For document management, we have www.document-management-solutions.co.uk). If we take the storage site for example, every single page has a link in the footer to our document management site, with the anchor text 'Cleardata Document Management' SEOMoz is telling me that these are seen as external links (as they are on a different URL's), and I'm just clarifying that would this be a major possible factor in the website not ranking highly? How should I rectify this issue?
Technical SEO | | janc0 -
Incorrect name on search result
Hi, While auditing the website for a new client that i inherited just noticed that when i search for 'hyundai roswell georgia' on Google the dealership name appearing on Google search result is incorrect. The name of the business is Rick Case Hyundai. However, it appears as Rick Case Honda(see attached screenshot). Any recommendation on how to fix this and why is this happening? Regards Neil azJCR.png
Technical SEO | | neildomain0 -
Reciprocal link building a bad idea?
Reciprical Link Building or one way traffic? Good morning from 8 degrees c but very sunny wetherby UK Regarding link acquisition ive had it in my head that the best idea is to secure inbound links only i.e avoid reciprocal link building so that when your source links to you you dont give them a link back. But is this no longer valid when targeting inbound links to increase rank? Is it ok to link back or will that "leak SEO juice" or whatever we decide to call it this week.
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Is this a good link?
Found a .gov link to my website www.kars4kids.org. The url it links to is http://www.nyc.gov/cgi-bin/exit.pl?url=http://www.kars4kids.org/ which does eventually redirect to kars4kids. Will search engines see this as a link?
Technical SEO | | Morris770 -
Is this seen as a Link Exchange
If i give a self serve banner ad to someone on my blog or a image with a link and they give me a text link ad is that in googles eyes a link exchange or a one way link.
Technical SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0