Clean Up Your Site Broken Links - 404 Errors
November 4, 2008 | Written by annliu | Filed Under Newsletter
Greetings all,
I am very happy to see you here and thanks for stop by .. 
Have you checked your site recently? Have you audited your site’s quality and performance? Are there any broken links on your site? Have you removed some old pages while forgetting to clean up the links pointing to those pages? Did you change your file structure and leave some legacy links behind? You may not even know if you have these issues, but the search engines do.
For sure, both you and I would have number of 404 errors on our blogs and websites, that’s what I emphasis in this week’s MBA Digest. It might be from one of those articles you linked to, which does no longer exist or a dead link.
If the missing page returns a 404 error or your site have redirect errors, the search engine will identify the page as non-existent and catalog the pages linking to it. If the page linking to the 404 error remains on this list for too long or has too many links to 404 errors, in all likelihood this would have a negative effect on the “Quality Score” of that page. S0 please keep the number of 404 errors and broken links on your site to the minimum or none if possible.
The basic idea of this is to help the robots index content more efficiently from websites and help index relevant information.
If your site isn’t initially spider-compatible (has broken links, lacks META and TITLE tags and other elements important for the search engines), then you’re having visibility problems. You can read more detail information in this week’s MBA Digest; you can read more from there.
If your website get visibility problems (how your pages comply with spiders’ needs) and usability problems (how suitable and convenient the website is for human visitors), you really need to do something to clean up the mess before you start any SEO campaign.
Do these broken links affect your search engine rankings? As you know, search engines rank a website’s individual pages and not whole sites, for my understanding - broken links can degrade your rankings on a site wide basis. In order to maintain your website’s quality level, you need to avoid visibility (invisible audience) and usability (human audience) problems.
You may wondering isn’t this the job of the webmaster or site administrator to clean up the broken links?
Well, if you want to gain site traffic and achieve better search engine ranking, you need to adopt Integrated Approach, which considers site quality maintenance as a secondary yet obligatory addition to your promotion campaigns and traffic analysis. The content of your website is the foundation upon which to build the online business. The higher the quality of the material your site has, the more successful the business will be.
Keeping your site clean off broken links and http errors are a sign that you are a “good guy” to search engines. You may think it is just a simple ignorable thing but technically, it will pass lot of value to you.
Till next time – Happy clean up the broken links. 
Cheers
Thanks for visiting Marketingbyann blog. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed, or sign up my No-Hype, No-BS, No Spam MBA ezine that packed with e-courses, make money online and Internet marketing business tips!
[...] Source: Clean Up Your Site Broken Links - 404 Errors [...]