Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?
-
Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this.
When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost?
We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name).
Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!
-
First off, thanks everyone for your replies
I'm well versed in best practices of 301 redirects, sitemaps, etc, etc. In other words, I fully know the optimal way to handle this. But, this is one of those situations where there are so many redirects involved (thousands) for a large site, that I want to make sure that what we are doing is fully worth the development time.
We are migrating a large website that was already migrated to a different CMS several years ago. There are thousands of legacy 301 redirects already in place for the current site, and many of those pages that are being REDIRECTED TO (from the old URL versions) receive very little/if any traffic. We need to decide if the work of redirecting them is worth it.
I'm not as worried about broken links for pages that don't get any traffic (although we ideally want 0 broken links). What I am most worried about, however, is losing domain authority and the whole site potentially ranking a little bit lower overall as a result.
Nakul's response (and Frederico's) are closest to what I am asking...but everyone is suggesting the same thing...that we will lose domain authority (example measurement: SEOmoz's OpenSiteExplorer domain authority score) if we don't keep those redirects in place (but of course, avoiding double redirects).
So, thanks again to everyone on this thread If anyone has a differing opinion, I'd love to hear it...but this is pretty much what I expected: everyone's best educated assessment is that you will lose domain authority when 301 redirects are lifted and broken links are the end result.
-
Great question Dan. @Jesse, you are on the right track. I think the question was misunderstood.
The question is, if seomoz.org links to Amazon.com/nakulgoyal and that page does not exist, is there link juice flow ? Think about it. It's like thinking about a citation. If seomoz.org mentions amazon.com/nakulgoyal, but does not actually have the hyperlink, is there citation flow.
So my question to the folks is, is there citation flow ? In my opinion, the answer is yes. There's some DA that will get passed along. Eventually, the site owner might identify the 404, "which they should" and setup a 301 redirect from Amazon.com/nakulgoyal to whatever pages makes most sense for the user, in which case there will be a proper link juice flow.
So to clarify what I said:
-
Scenario 1:
SiteA.com links to SiteB.com/urldoesnotexist - There is some (maybe close to negligible) domain authority flow. from siteA.com to siteB.com (Sort of like a link citation). There may not be a proper link juice flow, because the link is broken. -
Scenario 2:
SiteA.com links to SiteB.com/urldoesnotexist and this URL is 301 redirected SiteB.com/urlexists - In this case, there is both a authority flow and a link juice flow from SiteA.com to SiteB.com/urlexists
**That's my opinion. Think about it, the 301 redirect from /urldoesnotexist to /urlexists might get added 1 year from now and might be mistakenly removed at some point temporarily. There's going to be an affect in both cases. So in my opinion, the crux is, watch your 404's and redirect them when you and when it makes sense for the user. That way you have a good user experience and you can have the link juice flow where it should. **
-
-
Ideally you want to keep the number of 404 pages low because it tells the search engine that the page is a dead end, ask any SEO, it's best to keep the number of 404's as low as possible.
Link equity tells Google why to rank a page or give the root domain more authority. However, Google does not want users to end up on dead pages. So it will not help the site, rather hurt it. My recommendation is to create a sitemap and submit to Google WMT with the pages you want the spiders to index.
Limit the 404's as much as possible and try to 301 them if possible to a relevant page (from a user perspective).
-
I think, and correct me if I'm wrong Dan, you guys are misunderstanding the question.
He means that if you do actually create a 404 page for all your broken links to land on, will the juice pass from there to your domain (housing the 404 page) and on to whatever internal links you've built into said 404 page.
The answer, I think, is no. Reason for this is 404 is a status code returned before the 404 page is produced. Link juice can pass through either links (200) or redirects (301).
Again... I THINK.
Was this more what you were asking?
-
Equity is passed to a 404 page, which does not exist, therefore that equity is lost.
-
Thanks, Bryan. This doesn't really answer the exact question, though: is link equity still passed (and domain authority preserved) by broken links producing 404 Error Pages?
-
No they don't. Search engine spiders follow the link as a user, if the pages no longer exist and you cannot forward the user to a better page then create a good 404 page that will keep the users intrigued.
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
-
My last site crawl shows over 700 404 errors all with void(0 added to the ends of my posts/pages.
Hello, My last site crawl shows over 700 404 errors all with void(0 added to the ends of my posts/pages. I have contacted my theme company but not sure what could have done this. Any ideas? The original posts/pages are still correct and working it just looks like it did duplicates and added void(0 to the end of each post/page. Questions: There is no way to undo this correct? Do I have to do a redirect on each of these? Will this hurt my rankings and domain authority? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks, Wade
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neverenoughmusic.com0 -
Would You Redirect a Page if the Parent Page was Redirected?
Hi everyone! Let's use this as an example URL: https://www.example.com/marvel/avengers/hulk/ We have done a 301 redirect for the "Avengers" page to another page on the site. Sibling pages of the "Hulk" page live off "marvel" now (ex: /marvel/thor/ and /marvel/iron-man/). Is there any benefit in doing a 301 for the "Hulk" page to live at /marvel/hulk/ like it's sibling pages? Is there any harm long-term in leaving the "Hulk" page under a permanently redirected page? Thank you! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amag0 -
Pages with excessive number of links
Hi all, I work for a retailer and I've crawled our website with RankTracker for optimization suggestions. The main suggestion is "Pages with excessive number of links: 4178" The page with the largest amount of links has 634 links (627 internal, 7 external), the lowest 382 links (375 internal, 7 external). However, when I view the source on any one of the example pages, it becomes obvious that the site's main navigation header contains 358 links, so every new page starts with 358 links before any content. Our rivals and much larger sites like argos.co.uk appear to have just as many links in their main navigation menu. So my questions are: 1. Will these excessive links really be causing us a problem or is it just 'good practice' to have fewer links
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bee159
2. Can I use 'no follow' to stop Google etc from counting the 358 main navigation links
3. Is have 4000+ pages of your website all dumbly pointing to other pages a help or hindrance?
4. Can we 'minify' this code so it's cached on first load and therefore loads faster? Thank you.0 -
Should my back links go to home page or internal pages
Right now we rank on page 2 for many KWs, so should i now focus my attention on getting links to my home page to build domain authority or continue to direct links to the internal pages for specific KWs? I am about to write some articles for several good ranking sites and want to know whether to link my company name (same as domain name) or KW to the home page or use individual KWs to the internal pages - I am only allowed one link per article to my site. Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
Is it a bad idea to have a "press" page and link to press mentions of our company?
We've recently been getting quite a bit of press. Would it be wise to create a "press" page and link to mentions of us or would this devalue the links on the press pages as Google may think they reciprocal?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JenniferDacosta0 -
100 + links on a scrolling page
Can you add more than 100 links on your webpage If you have a webpage that adds more content from a database as a visitor scrolls down the page. If you look at the page source the 100 + links do not show up, only the first 20 links. As you scroll down it adds more content and links to the bottom of the page so its a continuos flowing page if you keep scrolling down. Just wanted to know how the 100 links maximum fits into this scenario ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlane90 -
How to properly link to products from category pages?
Hi All, We have an e-commerce website and the category pages are built so that there is a product image and below it there is the title. Both the image and the title are in a href (each on its own). I encountered the following unfinished discussion here at MOZ:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-to-optimize-achor-text-links-on-ecommerce-category-page#post-93758 The discussion states that its improper. The question is - if it is wrong then why? (maybe because Google will give its weight to the image anchor instead of the text anchor since it is higher in the page). The other question is how to resolve the matter?
Should I add nofollow to the image href? Thanks0 -
Increasing Internal Links But Avoiding a Link Farm
I'm looking to create a page about Widgets and all of the more specific names for Widgets we sell: ABC Brand Widgets, XYZ Brand Widgets, Big Widgets, Small Widgets, Green Widgets, Blue Widgets, etc. I'd like my Widget page to give a brief explanation about each kind of Widget with a link deeper into my site that gives more detail and allows you to purchase. The problem is I have a lot of Widgets and this could get messy: ABC Green Widgets, Small XYZ Widgets, many combinations. I can see my Widget page teetering on being a link farm if I start throwing in all of these combos. So where should I stop? How much do I do? I've read more than 100 links on a page being considered a link farm, is that a hardline number or a general guideline?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rball10