Inbound Links from Broken Pages
-
Hi all,
We have a client who has a lot of inbound links from external pages that are broken/404. The 404 pages are EXTERNAL and linking to my client's pages, but their domain still has authority and their home page (and other pages) still load.
My question is: what should we do about this? Do we detox those links, or are they still sending some juice given that they have domain authority, despite the fact that the pages linking to my client are broken?
So in other words:
- My client is: yyyy.com
- They have a link from vvvv.com/services, which is a broken page
- So what should we do about this?
Thanks all!
Gavin
-
Hi Gavin,
Agree with Martijn here - links from 404ing pages are very unlikely to either help or hinder a website, just as inbound links to pages on your site that 404 also don't help / hurt.
You probably do not need to do anything about these links. However, if they were very good links in the past and you would like them back, you could consider contacting the webmasters of the sites with the broken pages and asking them if they are aware of their errors and / or would consider updating.
Cheers,
Jane
-
Hi Gavin,
Probably by now the links to your client have lost their value as Google also noticed that these pages are giving a 404 response instead of a 200. That's why I won't bother about them, probably they will disappear one day from Open Site Explorer or any other link profile research tool you're using.
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
-
Do affiliate links to Amazon product pages boost those pages in the SERPs?
From casual observation, I believe that affiliate links to Amazon product pages, move those Amazon pages up in the SERPs. Does anyone else have an opinion on this? Philosophically, I think that affiliate links should not be counted in the rankings, even if they have not been nofollowed. I think that Google and other search engines should be filtering these links because they are compensated. Thanks for your thoughts.
Link Building | | EGOL2 -
Number of other outgoing links on a page
"If the link pointing to your website is among hundreds or thousands of other outgoing links on
Link Building | | ross254sidney
a single page, then chances are that it isn't as valuable." What is the maximum limit to look for outgoing links before placing our link?0 -
Multiple on-page links to single domain
Hi, the main focus of my question is to add a bit more information to my client as to where they are going wrong. Firstly they have a directory on a third party domain with subdirectories containing all their product listings. All the links need to be no-follow for sure. However, from a link juice passing perspective if there are per page say 20-30 links to varying URLs on the same domain is it still the same sort of calculation that the link juice is sufficiently weakened that each link has little value, or because the links are to the same domain there is an extra (potential) filter going on?
Link Building | | MickEdwards0 -
Posts and Page linking
Can I link from the post to page? I read on semoz that in order to avoid crazy linking I should not link from a post everywhere. Is it ok to link from some post which is in a category to a page?
Link Building | | VillasDiani0 -
Competitor analysis and broken links
I have just been looking at a competitors links and have discovered some of the links they have obtained dont actually exist when clicking through to the directory or blog in question, although still appear in opensiteexplorer. Is this common? and is it just a sign of bad link building practices?
Link Building | | Deanknight0 -
Google Link Disavow and sites with extremely heavy but poor link metrics
Need help/opinions from the SEO's out there. I am working with a site that in the past hired an SEO company out of India. Over the course of their time together, this company submitted the clients url to tens of thousands of link exchanges and directories. Around the time of Penguin, the owners told me their inquiries dried up. Literally that same week they had a new website launched (designed by a local competitor) that really butchered the site. They were convinced the reduction in traffic/inquiries was due to the new site but I am convinced otherwise (suspect Penguin). Not only does the site need to be re-structured but their link portfolio needs to be diversified. Now on the plus side, the company caters and sponsors a number of events that earns them organic, relevant links. These are overshadowed by the tons of poor, irrelevant ones though. I read a few posts recently on the Google Link Disavow tool and to proceed slowly due to the unknown nature surrounding it. I have a good idea of what links are problematic and which ones are well served. However, the number of problematic links in my estimation is quite high (thousands). I am very hesitant to dive into Google Disavow and submit such a large number of requests. What are your thoughts? How would you proceed?
Link Building | | mattylac1 -
Merging 10 niche pages into 1 large page: how to go about it?
Good day,
Link Building | | rayvensoft
I am new to SEOmoz, so please allow me to take this opportunity to introduce myself before jumping into the questions. I have a small network of sites that focus on language education online. I have been working on them for about 3 years, and they were starting to do well. I am sure I made some mistakes along the way with regards to SEO (I paid for article distribution, and directory submission). I also did link exchanges - mainly with related sites, but some of them were kind of grey . I stayed away from blackhat entirely.
So, like many people I got affected by Google Penguin. Luckily it was not as bad as many of the people I have heard about. 7 out of my 10 sites, stayed on or near the top for the main keywords. They did however drop for some of the secondary keywords. 3 of the sites however got hit hard. Based on this, I have ventured to guess that google is telling me I was doing it about 70% right, and 30% wrong. Well, live and learn.
After April 24th I started to scower the web to find out what happened and to see what to do. In my readings I noticed that a lot of people were affected, but some where not. The one thing I found that most of the people who were affected had in commune was that they were on SEOmoz. So I decided to join. So now I am here to hopefully learn what I did wrong, and what I need to do right. I have no problem at all in starting from scratch and putting in the hard work. Now, as for my question. As I mentioned, not all of my sites were hit by Penguin. More of them survived than got killed. I was hoping to be able to leverage those sites to give the new larger site a kick-start. Just to give you some metric, all 10 sites have a quality rank of between 40-60 according opensiteexplorer. The linking is nothing extreme. The pages have anywhere from 200-1000 links. Nothing more than that. So here are the questions. 1) The SEO I did on all 10 sites were very similar. So I am afraid of just doing a 301 redirect from the 7 other sites in the future google may punish them as well, and as such my main page new page will suffer. What would you guys recommend. Instead of a 301, I could just ad a link to the sub pages on the new site. It would be less effective, but also less risky. What would you all suggest? 2) If I take the 301 option, what is the general recommendation on how to phase it in. I am assuming Google would not like it if all 7 pages got redirected on the same day. That would essentially make the page have 5000 or so links overnight. What is the general recommendation for these kinds of things. one 301 a week? one 301 a month? The 301's would not be to the homepage, they would each go to a relevant sub-section of the site. Sorry for the long first post. My wife tells me I don't know when enough is enough sometimes. 🙂 Thanks in advance for any assistance and I am excited to see what I can learn on SEOmoz.0 -
Etsy.com --Getting link juice through other pages on search results?
My sister has a store page on etsy.com where she sells home made crafts. And I want to help her rank higher on google with some of the other etsy stores. So i started to look at the other etsy store pages that are ranking well on google and found that they have a page authority between 48 to 52. So i looked at the backlinks of the ones ranking well on google with high page authority and found that many of their best links came from the internal search results page on etsy.com, and some only had one link from just an arbitrary etsy.com search page. I'm thinking this is because another product being listed on the seach page has a high page authority which then passes some of its link juice onto every other product on the page. But what is interesting is products are always being sold or getting added so even though you are on a search results page that happens to benifit from the link juice of another product the next time the page gets crawled you will be on a different search page. So i am thinking in order to maintain high page authority to you just have to have a lot of products listed so that there is a greater likely hood that you will find yourself on the same search page as another high authority page. I have not been doing SEO very long so i would love to hear what others think. I really have no idea, am i on the right track with this? (edited post) Thanks
Link Building | | doug5650