Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?

[M_D_Golden_Peak]

Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this.

When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost?

We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name).

Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!

[Bryan_Loconto]

No they don't. Search engine spiders follow the link as a user, if the pages no longer exist and you cannot forward the user to a better page then create a good 404 page that will keep the users intrigued.

[M_D_Golden_Peak]

Thanks, Bryan. This doesn't really answer the exact question, though: is link equity still passed (and domain authority preserved) by broken links producing 404 Error Pages?

[FedeEinhorn]

Equity is passed to a 404 page, which does not exist, therefore that equity is lost.

[jesse-landry]

I think, and correct me if I'm wrong Dan, you guys are misunderstanding the question.

He means that if you do actually create a 404 page for all your broken links to land on, will the juice pass from there to your domain (housing the 404 page) and on to whatever internal links you've built into said 404 page.

The answer, I think, is no. Reason for this is 404 is a status code returned before the 404 page is produced. Link juice can pass through either links (200) or redirects (301).

Again... I THINK.

Was this more what you were asking?

[Bryan_Loconto]

Ideally you want to keep the number of 404 pages low because it tells the search engine that the page is a dead end, ask any SEO, it's best to keep the number of 404's as low as possible.

Link equity tells Google why to rank a page or give the root domain more authority. However, Google does not want users to end up on dead pages. So it will not help the site, rather hurt it. My recommendation is to create a sitemap and submit to Google WMT with the pages you want the spiders to index.

Limit the 404's as much as possible and try to 301 them if possible to a relevant page (from a user perspective).

[NakulGoyal]

Great question Dan. @Jesse, you are on the right track. I think the question was misunderstood.

The question is, if seomoz.org links to Amazon.com/nakulgoyal and that page does not exist, is there link juice flow ? Think about it. It's like thinking about a citation. If seomoz.org mentions amazon.com/nakulgoyal, but does not actually have the hyperlink, is there citation flow.

So my question to the folks is, is there citation flow ? In my opinion, the answer is yes. There's some DA that will get passed along. Eventually, the site owner might identify the 404, "which they should" and setup a 301 redirect from Amazon.com/nakulgoyal to whatever pages makes most sense for the user, in which case there will be a proper link juice flow.

So to clarify what I said:

• Scenario 1:
  SiteA.com links to SiteB.com/urldoesnotexist - There is some (maybe close to negligible) domain authority flow. from siteA.com to siteB.com (Sort of like a link citation). There may not be a proper link juice flow, because the link is broken.

• Scenario 2:
  SiteA.com links to SiteB.com/urldoesnotexist and this URL is 301 redirected SiteB.com/urlexists - In this case, there is both a authority flow and a link juice flow from SiteA.com to SiteB.com/urlexists

**That's my opinion. Think about it, the 301 redirect from /urldoesnotexist to /urlexists might get added 1 year from now and might be mistakenly removed at some point temporarily. There's going to be an affect in both cases. So in my opinion, the crux is, watch your 404's and redirect them when you and when it makes sense for the user. That way you have a good user experience and you can have the link juice flow where it should. **

[M_D_Golden_Peak]

First off, thanks everyone for your replies

I'm well versed in best practices of 301 redirects, sitemaps, etc, etc. In other words, I fully know the optimal way to handle this. But, this is one of those situations where there are so many redirects involved (thousands) for a large site, that I want to make sure that what we are doing is fully worth the development time.

We are migrating a large website that was already migrated to a different CMS several years ago. There are thousands of legacy 301 redirects already in place for the current site, and many of those pages that are being REDIRECTED TO (from the old URL versions) receive very little/if any traffic. We need to decide if the work of redirecting them is worth it.

I'm not as worried about broken links for pages that don't get any traffic (although we ideally want 0 broken links). What I am most worried about, however, is losing domain authority and the whole site potentially ranking a little bit lower overall as a result.

Nakul's response (and Frederico's) are closest to what I am asking...but everyone is suggesting the same thing...that we will lose domain authority (example measurement: SEOmoz's OpenSiteExplorer domain authority score) if we don't keep those redirects in place (but of course, avoiding double redirects).

So, thanks again to everyone on this thread If anyone has a differing opinion, I'd love to hear it...but this is pretty much what I expected: everyone's best educated assessment is that you will lose domain authority when 301 redirects are lifted and broken links are the end result.