Google found bad links delete them or 301 redirect?

[DerekM88]

we went into our google account and saw about 70 bad links that they found on our site.

what's the best thing to do, seo-wise:

• should we go into the pages that have the bad links and delete them from the html code, or

• re-direct them in our htaccess script?

[SEOKeith]

If you have links to dead pages on your site remove them from the HTML.

301 redirects are used when you are moving pages / changing URL's.

[mediabase]

Hi DerekM88, When we talk about broken/bad links, it always affects our website. It can be very destructive & can create a adverse effects on our website. The website may results in negative user experience  because when a page is removed we get an 404 error message , it will leads to user a negative experience & it will never visit the website again.This overall reduces the the reputation of the website from the SEO point of view.

So we have to take certain measure for fixing these bad links. In my personal opinion you should delete the bad links because whenever search engine spiders crawl a website & suddenly he founds some bad links then it will not crawl it & leaves a negative feedback also. Below there are some measures from which you can easily fix these erros.

Fix the broken links

I hope that your query had been solved.

[WillQ]

Hi Derek, I assume by "bad links" you mean pages on your domain that are returning a 404 error?

If this is the case then there're normally two things I do in these situations.

1. Once I've found the list of 404s I'll look at the page authority of that page in open site explorer (the URL will still show results even if the content is no longer there).

2. If any of these 404 pages are being linked to from EXTERNAL pages then I'll 301 those pages to the most similar other page on the domain.

3. Run Xenu Link Sleuth (it's free, Google it if you don't have it) over the domain and find every link to these 404 pages.

4. Manually go through and remove these dud links.

Hope that helps!

301 redirects should always be used if you delete a page that's built up links from external pages (or if you've merged the content into a larger page).

[ShaMenz]

Hi Derek,

I think kjay, Harald & Will have all pretty much covered removal (or correction) of links that are being called from within the pages on your site and using 301 redirects to capture traffic from external links.

I would also make sure that you have a well designed custom 404 page set up for your site so that any link that isn't covered by the work you have done on the above will still provide an opportunity for the visitor to get to the content they are looking for.

You should make sure that your custom 404 page contains some well written text that invites the visitor to explore the site to find other content that will help them and a menu that will allow them to click through to other parts of your site.

Hope that helps,

Sha