Old Content Has Broken Links - something to worry about?

4 replies
  • SEO
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I have a blog that has had several posts written a day for several years. The site was moved between CMS systems a few times and this broke a lot of links. I have several thousand links indexed and maybe 25% are broken, mostly old pages (from a few years ago). New stuff is fine. Is there anything I should do about these old links? Delete the pages entirely? Does this harm my search engine ranking due to the index errors this may cause?
#broken #content #links #worry
  • Profile picture of the author JOSourcing
    Banned
    Broken links, from what I've heard, can impact rankings. But instead of deleting the pages, why not redirect the links inside of them from within your .htaccess file?
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    • Profile picture of the author spiker12
      Pardon my ignorance here, is there a plugin or tool that could help me automate this? There's hundreds of these and no real pattern - I am not even certain how the links were broken. I assume most are just posts/pages that no longer can be tracked back via links to the homepage - but they remain in a sitemap or were previously indexed I guess.
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      • Profile picture of the author AprilCT
        Just put the words broken link checker into one of the SE's and you will find some sites that will help identify them. Unfortunately, I don't know how to automate fixing them. Hopefully more people will see your post and let you know if they have anything that will help.

        In any event, broken links need fixed. If it's overwhelming, just do a few at a time until you get it done, but do fix them.
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  • Profile picture of the author dmtaylor247
    If you're on Wordpress maybe this can help?

    WordPress › Broken Link Checker « WordPress Plugins

    if not make a suggestion or fire of an email, he may be able to help you.
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