If people link to you incorrectly, does it hurt you?
-
In Google WM tools I'm seeing so many 404 crawl errors but they're all from other sites linking to us incorrectly, which I can't do anything about. Will this hurt us somehow as far as SEO goes?
The logical thing would be that it would hurt the site doiing the linking but it does come up in OUR WM tools, so it makes me wonder.
-
I think everyone hit this on the head but I had one quick point to drop. It might be good to search over the sites as well to look at the most valued sites that are linking to you with 404 errors. I would try to then reach out to them personally and ask if they could update the link. You often can get a specific anchor text or a link to a page deeper within your website.
Good luck with it!
-
Generally speaking, inbound links can't hurt you. Websites link to each other all the time and websites move or remove content all the time. 404s hurt if your own site if you are linking to bad URLs because you're wasting crawl budget.
-
Thanks so much!
-
LOL,
I knew I saw it...
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/set-it-and-forget-it-seo-chasing-the-elusive-passive-seo-dream
A script engine created by virante based off of Levenshtein Distance, also known as the Edit Distance
-
No they won't hurt you, but setup redirects for them.
-
Thanks for all the responses. Of course, I thought of the redirect route, but there are hundreds of wrong links, so I was trying to avoid the 301 thing. I am the webmaster, so if anyone does remember what that script was, that's be great!
-
If you've got inbound link to non-existent pages then set up 301 redirects to the most relevant page. At the moment any link-juice you could be receiving form these links is being wasted.
Broken links won't hurt you - you just won't get the benefits!
-
You can help this!
You can use the data from WM tools to create 301 redirects on your site that will direct these incorrect queries to the correct page, preserving more of the authority than letting it fall off with a 404
There was actually a post recently (4 or 5 months ago) about doing this automatically using a server side script that actually "fixes" it for you automatically. But it is pretty advanced, and if you aren't dealing with thousands of them, might be easier to do yourself (or have your webmaster take care of) (I was not able to find or remember what it was called, maybe someone else will)
If this is just PDF documents and Files that have been picked up by scrapers, I personally don't worry about these so much, but someone may disagree with that
w00t!
-
I'm not sure if it can hurt you, however you can redirect their bad links to working pages with 301 redirects.
example: I link to your site with yousite.com/paeg.html (misstyped on purpose) but your page is actually located at yoursite.com/page.html
In this case create a 301 redirect to point from /paeg.html to /page.html and you will get people coming to the right place.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Multilingual Sitewide Links
Multilingual links in the footer section is being counted as backlink and we are getting tons of backlinks from all the 7 lingual websites. Is there a solution where we eliminate these links and still having the option to navigate to other lingual pages? vr24NAv
Technical SEO | | comfortclick0 -
Is it possible to export Inbound Links in a CSV file categorized by Linking Root Domains ?
Hi, I am performing an analysis of the total inbound links to my homepage and I would like to have the total amount of inbound links categorized by the Linking root domains. For example, the Open Site explorer does offer the feature to show you the Linking Root Domains to your page. Then when you click on the first Linking Root Domain, it also shows you the Top Linking Pages ( Which means all the pages that link to your page from this particular top level domain) Now I would like to export this data to a CSV file, but open site explorer only exports the total amount of top level linking domains. Does anyone has a solution to this problem ? Thank you very much for the help in advance!
Technical SEO | | Feweb0 -
Thousands of external links
My site has supposedly over 4,000 external links from it. Is there a good piece of software that could scrape my site that tell me from which page all the links originate from and where they're all going? I'm surprised that the number is this high because our entire site is only a few hundred pages. Here's the site XXXkidecalsXXX.com (just remove the XXX for the URL.) If you want to weigh in on any other issues you see with the site, I'd be happy for any suggestions in general.
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
Finding Broken Back Links
Hello there I am new here but really want to mend my broken website by myself as I enjoy a challenge! I used to have great rankings but have moved websites a few times (same domain) and the last move was to wordpress. I now have loads of broken links in the SERPS and wondered if there was an easy way to flush google of them as they are getting lots of 404 errors? They really are too many to do a 301 on (I have done the main pages) Also how do I do a crawl of my website for any internal broken links? Does SEOmoz have something or is there an external program you would recommend? Thanks Victoria
Technical SEO | | vcasebourne0 -
Find broken links in Excel?
Hello, I have a large list of URL's in an excel sheet and I am looking for a way to check them for 404 errors. Please help! Adam
Technical SEO | | digitalops0 -
Does it hurt to have a dynamic counter in your page title?
Currently we work with page titles which display the number of products we have as a counter. This number is highly volatile and can change every day, so that our page title changes all the time. We did this to improve user experience, meet expectations and improve click through rates. Question is whether this can hurt our rankings and if someone has experimented with this or has experience with this?
Technical SEO | | ElmarReizen0 -
Can Google read onClick links?
Can Google read and pass link juice in a link like this? <a <span="">href</a><a <span="">="#Link123" onClick="window.open('http://www.mycompany.com/example','Link123')">src="../../img/example.gif"/></a> Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jorgediaz0 -
What is link juice - and how do I utilise it?
Apologies for the very basic question - I am trying to determine exactly what link juice is. Every article I seem to find assumes that you already know what link juice is. From what I can tell it is how your internal links push around from your homepage and how they flow through your site. I don't understand how to optimize this and how to improve it throughout my site - or what the opportunities are. I'll attach an image of my site link numbers compared to a few rivals (names removed) to illustrate the difference - not vs the first column but certainly the other two. Can someone shed some light on Link Juice for me and point me in the right direction? Thanks. Oy2c5.png
Technical SEO | | Benj250