Invalid Links (404′s)- Generally Don’t Harm Your Ranking

A very busy thread within the Google Webmasters Help forum currently contains one webmaster asking about the large number of invalid links on his site and whether they will harm his rankings.

The answer to this is no they won’t necessarily harm your websites rankings within Google, however, they probably will hurt your sites internal linking structure as well as user experience, but it is more than likely that you will keep your positions, as long as you have nothing else wrong, Search Engine Optimization wise, on your site that is. These invalid links will harm that specific page rankings as it is not there and you are not receiving the full benefit of internal linking, but having a 404 and isolating that page will not harm your whole sites rankings, it is probably best that you sort these things out however as user may not use your services if they cannot get to the information they require.

John Mueller, who works at Google, had this to say about invalid 404 links:

“The number of crawl errors on your site generally doesn’t affect the rest of your site’s crawling, indexing, or ranking. It’s completely normal for a site to have URLs that are invalid and which return 404 (or 410, etc). That wouldn’t be something which we would count against a site — on the contrary, it’s something which tells us that the site is configured correctly.”