Can 404 results from external links hurt site ranking?

[GreenHatWeb]

Hello,

I'm helping a university transition to a brand new website. In some cases the URLs will change between the old site and new site. They will put 301 redirects in place to make sure that people who have old URLs will get redirected properly to the new URLs.

However they also have a bunch of old pages that they aren't using anymore. They don't really care if people still try to get to them (because they don't think many will), but they do care about the overall search engine rankings.

I know that if a site has internal 404 links, that could hurt rankings. However can external links that return a 404 hurt rankings?

Ryan

[SEOKeith]

Well if those external links coming in passed link juice and they no long link due to a 404... Then you will lose link juice... So this could potentially affect rankings.

I would either 301 the broken links to the new most relevant page or better still contract the external sites web host and ask them to change the link to the new address (depending on the amount of links).

[GeorgeAndrews]

It won't hurt rankings, but I think this is a great opportunity for you to turn those broken links into good links. You should find all of your broken links, contact the site owners, and let them know they can fix that link with a new link to a different page on your site that is still relevant.

Here is a guide for this:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/broken-link-building-guide-from-noob-to-novice

Hope this helps!