Effect of broken links on SEO?

Hello,

I run Xenu to check and fix broken links on my site. However, I have a
section of the site that has a lot of news articles. These articles are all
linked out to the original source. I get some Not Found broken links to news
sites like Yahoo News or magazines. I know these kinds of links often
disappear.

My question is how bad is it from an SEO viewpoint to have a bunch of broken
links like that the news articles? All of the internal links are fine.

Thanks,

Bob

On Mon, 13 Jun 2005 02:17:51 GMT, "ergobob"
<ergobob@sonic[REMOVE].net> wrote:

Hello,

I run Xenu to check and fix broken links on my site. However, I have a
section of the site that has a lot of news articles. These articles are all
linked out to the original source. I get some Not Found broken links to news
sites like Yahoo News or magazines. I know these kinds of links often
disappear.

My question is how bad is it from an SEO viewpoint to have a bunch of broken
links like that the news articles? All of the internal links are fine.

Thanks,

One site which google has favoured for a while now for one of the topo
phrases I'd like has an incredible number of broken links on it.
However the link text all builds up to make a nice pattern for google
to like.

I did toy with the idea of making up a site with already broken links
but the right number of keywords as an experiment but haven't got
round to playing at this yet.

--
http://searchfreebies.co.uk/freebies/index.php
freebies blog

"mogga" <di (AT) NOSPAMPLEASEmogga (DOT) com> wrote

On Mon, 13 Jun 2005 02:17:51 GMT, "ergobob"
ergobob@sonic[REMOVE].net> wrote:

Hello,

I run Xenu to check and fix broken links on my site. However, I have a
section of the site that has a lot of news articles. These articles are
all
linked out to the original source. I get some Not Found broken links to
news
sites like Yahoo News or magazines. I know these kinds of links often
disappear.

My question is how bad is it from an SEO viewpoint to have a bunch of
broken
links like that the news articles? All of the internal links are fine.

Thanks,


One site which google has favoured for a while now for one of the topo
phrases I'd like has an incredible number of broken links on it.
However the link text all builds up to make a nice pattern for google
to like.

I did toy with the idea of making up a site with already broken links
but the right number of keywords as an experiment but haven't got
round to playing at this yet.

One of my sites is like that at the moment.
It has template pages built ready for projects I haven't had time to
work on yet, has loads of duplicate pages and loads of broken links.
It doesn't seem to have a negative effect though.
I've been thinking about using this to my advantage by putting affiliate
links on my 404 page, rather than sending visitors back to the half
finished sections, I can send them straight to other sites via affiliate
links.