Dead links affect SEO

[Romeo]

Does dead links hurt SEO? Is there any tool or software to find dead links on our website?

[Falesh]

There are a couple of ways to check for them. First is to submit a sitemap to google, you can then view any errors the google bot has when crawling your site which flags up dead links. Another is to view your sites error log.

To check external links you could make up a HTML page with a list of the external links on your site and check them now and again. Alternatively you could whip up a brief script, e.g. using something like php's file_get_contents() to check each link exists.

[paul]

Dead links are neither bad or good, search engine might be simply ignoring this rather than penalizing a site for dead or broken links but better to get it fixed as we don't know how search engine will see dead links in future.

[James]

Search Engine does not penalize a site having dead or broken links. But it doesn't mean that one should have such links it's better to remove such links b'coz search engines want to have quality websites come up in their search result pages and a quality website is one that has unique content and no broken or dead links.

[paul]

Yes that's correct, it is better to remove the dead/ broken links.

[jon123]

I think it is better to 301 dead links rather than remove them, as long as the subject content is the same or similar.

[dessign]

To many broken links will definitely hurt your site. To detect broken links you can use Webmaster Central

Cheers

[Harry]

You can also use "Lynx" a text browser for crosschecking your broken/dead links.
Lynx looks at your website exactly the same way a search engine spider would so it will report you for your broken links.

[WHUK-DAN]

Its always good to keep your site updated.If you have broken links or dead links its better to get rid of them.

[Hases]

Hello there. Sorry for my stupied question, but what did you mean saying dead links?

[James]

Hello Hases,

to Webhosting UK.

Dead links are links that don't work anymore.

[Harry]

As James told as dead links are links which don't works I would like to explain it in more details :
Actually a dead link also called as a broken link which is a link on the net which points to a web page or server that is permanently unavailable.
Usually you get a 404 error for dead links which indicates that the web server responded, but the specific page could not be found.
For SEO point of view you should not have any dead/broken links for you site.

Hope this may help you....

[SBh]

If you are registered with google webmaster's tool you will be able to easily point out broken link error. In webmaster's tool you can find out all type of errors encountered during crawling.
Broken links affect much in google indexing specially for newer sites which are not fully indexed by google. Most often google stop indexing as a broken link is found, however it again returns after few days. Thus the indexing becomes considerably slow.

[paul]

Yea, I think two or three broken links may not hurt but if there are plenty of broken and dead links I hope it will start showing 404 error, and if it is not corrected timely the site will eventually dropped off the index, I guess.

[trishka]

Dead links must be removed.