How much do broken links hurt your rankings?

[jay88]

I know that broken links do negatively affect rankings a little, especially if they are making it hard for a spider to crawl. But has anyone noticed fixing every broken link actually noticably helping their rankings?

It am trying to do back-to-basics types of things as I wait for Jagger to end, and among them is going in and fixing old broken links.

Is it: "Oh my god, it will make a HUGE difference if you have no broken links in coparison to having hundereds of them"

or

"It may help somewhat but not really sure"

or

"It's nice to have a perfect clean site and make every page accessible to spiders and certainlky for visitors, but it doesn't make all that much of a difference at all"

[John Scott]

I haven't seen any evidence that broken links hurt your rankings all that much. I've often been frustrated by seeing pages choke-full of broken links in google's index, and thinking "damn why don't they get rid of this stuff??"

But they do say it helps to remove broken links. So, I'd say have at it.

My

[jay88]

cool - thanks

[obiztek]

Broken links does not affect ranking .

But if there are broken to your main page for which you have done the SEO than it will be great loss.It is like that you are posting an envelope without any address on it

[qbert_seo]

When Scott speaks I listen. Google's webmasters tools helps identify broken links, but unless the site it full of them I have seen little impact on a site's rankings in the SERPS.

Scott, what about engines other than Google, such as Yahoo and MSN? Same statement hold true?

[shaun12345]

qbert_seo yes the same statement is true for the other engines such as yahoo and msn

[qbert_seo]

Thanks shaun.

[shaun12345]

Not a problem man +rep always nice just joking haha