Disavow Dead Links?

[Mike.Goracke]

404 client errors can either be concerning or not. If an external website is pointing to a non-existent page on your site and it returns a 404 page, that is normal.

If you have a bad or broken internal link and visitors receive a 404, that is bad.

If you are seeing these 404 errors in Google Webmaster Tools, they can be from either external sites or your own site. You can choose to either set up 301 redirects if applicable OR you can simply let them die. GWT is simply alerting you that you may need to research the link. If you removed the page from your site and you do not have any other relevant content that replaced it, letting the link return a 404 is acceptable and Google will eventually remove that link from their index.

The Disavow Tools is mainly for spammy links pointing to your website and you have received warnings from Google for having a bad backlink profile.

Hope this helps.

Mike

[MattTrostle]

I didn't explain that right. These are external links pointing to our site. These show up in GWT and OSE. I exported the external links from those two sources and ran them through an http status tool.

[Mike.Goracke]

So you have two options:

1. create redirects to point to relevant content.

2. let the links continue to 404 and Google will eventually remove them from the index.

Mike

[MattTrostle]

These are external links. Can't 301 them.

[Mike.Goracke]

Here is how I am understanding your situation and how I would either fix it or not worry about the 404s. Please correct me if I mistook what you are saying:

randomsite.com has a link pointing to yoursite.com/randomarticle.

yoursite.com/randomarticle no longer exists, so when Google or a visitor clicks on the link on randomsite.com they receive a 404 error (saying that page does not exist).

you can set up a 301 redirect on your server so when someone clicks on the link to yoursite.com/randomarticle from randomsite.com they are redirected to an applicable page (for instance, yoursite.com/newarticle) instead of getting the 404 error.

Mike

[djlaidler]

Hi Guys,

I edited my response above to clarify the confusion. Can you confirm Matt...

You are discussing a page on an external site that currently 404's. This page used to have a link to your site and subsequently was added to Webmasters and OSE in the past. Now this page no longer exists, but the reference still remains in Webmasters and OSE. Correct?

Dan

[MattTrostle]

Yes, Dan, that is correct.

Either the page that contained a link to oursite.com from someothersite.com is gone or the whole site is gone yet they still show up as an external link to oursite.com.

If it was only a few I wouldn't worry about it but there are a lot like this, hundreds probably.

So, for links like these, would that be a use for the disavow tool?

[Mike.Goracke]

Are they all from different domains or the same domain?

And regarding the Disavow links tool, Google specifically states, "We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you." - I would not recommend using the tool unless you have been warned by Google or you have thousands of spammy footer links or something and you are 100% confident they are causing issues with your site.

Mike

[djlaidler]

Hi Matt,

It is fair and reasonable for a site to be decommissioned from time to time (or a page or two OR say a category of pages). As the page no longer exists, you can't ask the admin to remove your link (which is what Google expects you to do before disavowing a link), so I would simply ignore these links in your exported list. They will disappear from GWT and OSE over time as they are no longer in existence.

Disavowing links amongst other things helps Google determine a sites intent on the web and therefore they only want you to utilise this service if you no longer trust the relevance of the link and have had no joy requesting it's removal.

Hope this helps,

Dan

[MattTrostle]

Different domains. So I would disavow at the domain level.

There are spammy links in my analysis. These dead links are some of them. If I go through the whole disavow process, it's recommended to get them all. I just don't know if dead pages or domains should be included.

We haven't gotten any warnings. We've seen some drop in traffic, but most rankings have held steady. The site has paid for links in the past, pre me of course.

and you are 100% confident they are causing issues with your site.

Can we really be 100% confident in anything SEO?

[Mike.Goracke]

Well played Matt

The main reason I am saying 100% confident is that you can mess up your website VERY easily using this tool. So you need to be very cautious in choosing to use it.

This is a great article: 6 Things To Think About Before Disavowing Links from Search Engine Land. It states, "If you haven’t actually been penalized and you start disavowing your links, you’re essentially outing yourself to Google that you manipulated the system. Make sure that you equivocally know you were penalized and it’s not just some random fluctuation in rankings, a sitemap or indexing problem, or an accidentally no-indexed page."

Just sayin' be careful.

Good luck!

Mike

[MattTrostle]

That is pretty much what I was thinking (and hoping). I just needed some confirmation.

Thanks so much for the help!

[MattTrostle]

I came across that article when looking for an answer to this question. That is a great point though. Don't want to tell on ourselves here!

Thanks a lot for your help on this!