A very busy thread within the Google Webmasters Help forum currently
contains one webmaster asking about the large number of invalid links on
his site and whether they will harm his rankings.
The answer to this is no they won’t necessarily harm your websites
rankings within Google, however, they probably will hurt your sites
internal linking structure as well as user experience, but it is more
than likely that you will keep your positions, as long as you have
nothing else wrong, SEO
wise, on your site that is. These invalid links will harm that specific
page rankings as it is not there and you are not receiving the full
benefit of internal linking, but having a 404 and isolating that page
will not harm your whole sites rankings, it is probably best that you
sort these things out however as user may not use your services if they
cannot get to the information they require.
John Mueller, who works at Google, had this to say about invalid 404 links:
“The number of crawl errors on your site generally doesn’t affect
the rest of your site’s crawling, indexing, or ranking. It’s completely
normal for a site to have URLs that are invalid and which return 404
(or 410, etc). That wouldn’t be something which we would count against a
site — on the contrary, it’s something which tells us that the site is
configured correctly.”
If you would like to know more about 404 errors then please do not hesitate to get in touch with us.
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