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
-
Rel Sponsored on Internal Links
Hi all. Should you use rel sponsored on internal links? Here is the scenario: a company accepts money from one of their partners to place a prominent link on their home page. That link goes to an internal page on the company's website that contains information about that partner's service. If this was an external link that the partner was paying for, then you would obviously use rel="sponsored" but since this is a link that goes from awebsite.com to awebsite.com/some-page/, it seems odd to qualify that link in this way. Does this change if the link contains a "sponsored" label in the text (not in the rel qualifier)? Does this change if this link looks more like an ad (i.e. a banner image) vs. regular text (i.e. a link in a paragraph)? Thanks for any and all guidance or examples you can share!
Technical SEO | | Matthew_Edgar0 -
Links disappeared
Hi, I am a wedding photographer based in Liverpool. I have been trying to do my own SEO for the last 6 months. I have been hovering around the top of page two for the main search terms for the past few years. I used an SEO company before christmas who got a lot of spammy links which resulted in my site dropping to page 4 of the SERPS. With the help of this forum I managed to locate them and disavow those links, and have tried to do it myself. I have managed to gain a few "featured weddings" on national wedding blogs and wrote a few articles for another wedding blog and also some forum comments. I have also got a few links for example from a wedding band in exchange for some photographs. I have got onto page 1 about 4 times, the best result was at position 6 on page 1 but every time I have slowly dropped out again. I have methodically (once a month) checked for any of the spammy links and updated the disavow list. My competitors have at best old forum comments and the like and on checking their websites with open site explorer are not actively link building at all. I have just checked my Webmaster tools and google is only recognising 51 links. (none of my good wedding blog links are there) I have an external links csv from the 28th June with 602 links on it. I changed my website around May of this year but it is still on the same domain name www.dwliverpoolphotography.co.uk. Can anybody help? Best wishes. David.
Technical SEO | | WallerD0 -
So many internal links to the same page
Hey guyz,
Technical SEO | | atakala
I'm working with a client that has a page which has many internal links to the same page .
Let me illustrate it.
So as you can see I have a page which is called in the image "page" :D.
As you can see, the **page **has many links to the solutions.htmls' anchor links which mean they are basically the same page ( solutions.html)
Is it going to be a problem for us to do that ?
And is there anyway to handle this problem?
Thank you for you patience. And sorry for my bad english 😄 4deRc1W.png0 -
Internal links best practices
In looking at the inbound links to a client’s Home page, I see that the link from each page of the website back to the Home page is an image, and the ALT text is “Home.” I have a few questions about this, and would appreciate help understanding best practices: --Does it matter that the link back to the Home page is an image (presumably the client’s logo)? -- If we keep the image link, wouldn’t it be better to use “client’s company name” as ALT text rather than “Home”? --Should I recommend using an HTML link back to the Home page, and using the company name as anchor text? (I don't think it's relevant, but the site is built in Drupal.) Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jrae0 -
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 -
No-follow links on advertising pages
Hi I run a job board that enables employers to post job vacancies and information about their organisations. These are 'paid for' pages (advertising) on our site. These link out to their own websites. My question is, would it be better for these links out to their sites to be no-follow? From my site's perspective, I cannot necessarily dictate the quality of their websites (although the majority are leading firms) as I would in article and feature content, where we do happily link out and refer to other quality sites with information that gives readers further information. I know that many large job boards do this where they run listings of feeds from other sites, but should we also do this at the page level where the link out is effectively paid for. What would be the pros and cons if I do or if I don't use no-follow? I hope this makes sense and look forward to some replies. Many thanks
Technical SEO | | CelestialChook0 -
Why would you remove a canonical link?
Currently, my client's blog makes a duplicate page every time someone comments on a post. The previous SEO consultant told the developer to not put a canonical link directing it to the main blog post. Did taking out the canonical link result in these duplicate pages? My question is why would she recommend this action? Is it best to now add in the canonical link in or should we implement a 301 redirect or insert a index: no follow? Would adding a canonical link keep duplicate pages from happening in the future?
Technical SEO | | Scratch_MM0