Dealing with dead links too numerous to fix manually

8 replies
  • SEO
  • |
We have news stories going back about 15 years that we're concerned contain links that were fine at the time but have subsequently become broken. I'm curious as to what the best way is to deal with them from an SEO perspective.
We can automatically find which stories have dead links but there are too many to manually fix. Would automatically replacing the links with a link to an single internal that is barred in robots.txt page apologising for the dead link and explaining why we can't fix them all be acceptable in Google's eyes?
#dead #dealing #fix #links #manually #numerous
  • Profile picture of the author Francisco PIW
    Yes, you can do that, but the thing is... how do you link all the broken links to that internal page without doing it manually?
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  • Profile picture of the author RebeccaSpills
    Hire a VA all day everyday for this kind of thing! Send them the list of broken links and how you want to remedy them then pay them per 10/100/1000 links so they can't just say it takes an hour each one.

    I know dozens of bloggers who go around fixing other people's broken links for money. Just make sure you find someone who knows what they're doing. And pay them fairly, of course!
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  • Profile picture of the author paulgl
    Complete waste of time worrying about them. They are a nonissue.

    Set up a custom 404, which one should have already....

    What are the chances of anyone searching for such a thing....getting results for one of your pages....and clicking on it.

    Nobody in their right mind would ever pay for any service to deal with dead links...unless the are brain dead as well.

    Paul
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  • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
    Gotta agree with Paulgl here. It's complete waste of time. Google has more broken links than anyone could ever count on their own sites. Google is not going to penalize you for broken links for articles that are 15 years old and get no traffic. Google cannot possibly even be crawling those articles anymore. I can't help wondering what value those 15 year old articles are and whether they even need to be on the site. If they are evergreen articles that still provide value and traffic, sure, definitely fix the links.
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    I loathe 404 pages with a passion.

    At the very least do a 301 redirect from broken sub URLs to the matching parent directory (category page).

    Only a fool would waste followed backlinks on a 404 page that will never rank in Google SERPs.
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  • Profile picture of the author Alancory
    Dealing with dead link is really tough task, but it can be easily handled by adding custom 404 error page if your site is in wordpress, or any other CMS, easily you can create if and in other case you have to ask to tech guys.

    You can also block these broken links from robots'txt so that can prevent to crawling it.
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  • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
    Yukon brings up a good point here, You never indicated whether or not these old article pages have backlinks to them. If not, and if they aren't really a source of traffic, the pages don't matter anyway. I'm not sure what he was getting at with the wasted link reference. I was assuming these were outbound links and not links to other pages of your own website that no longer exist.
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  • Profile picture of the author George Schwab
    I had this issue in a big way with an old domain that got re-purposed

    simply did a 404 on it -> then let all links go through a 301 - so G knows
    the old links are dead and new ones valid.

    In case you have and keep the site where the dead links are on, you basically can
    replace them yourself within minutes by using a server side script that does
    "search and replace" you can download those in php or asp depending whether you
    use unix or win server.
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