Hi, If you have a shopping price comparision site and use a "More Info" link by every merchants product so that your visitors can get more info, then this will be alright as it gives your visitors more info. But what about if your site keeps adding new merchants and alot of your currently merchants keep disappearing from your site as they no longer other their affiliate program or datafeed. All of the products and pages for the merchant will be off your site and any links pointing to them pages in Google will become 404 errors. Now we are talking anywhere from 1,000 broken links to 200,000 broken links in Google, which will continuously be happening. Could this be dangeous in that Google may penalise your site or ban your site for this activity because you keep making their site link to broken pages.
I have no proof of this, but... my opinion is no, this will not hurt you. Google is intelligent enough to determine what kind of site you have (information, e-commerce, etc).
I'm more concerned about the 404 errors / broken links that will keep appearing in Google from my site. One minute there is a page and the next there isn't. Could this damage a sites ranking, get them a penalty or even a ban? I constantly have products taken of my site week in week out. So I was thinking would it be best to scrap the "more product information" part of the site and just have the normal listings and when someone clicks on the listing it goes straight to the product information on the merchants site instead.
If a site has a lot of broken links then why would google want to send users to a site with loads of dead ends and give them a poor experience? It can affect your ranking for obvious reasons.
I don't think you quite understand what I mean unless I have read your post wrong. The site in question will not have any broken links. The reasons for this is because I have total control of it, when I merchant becomes in active and stops supplying their datafeed then all their products will be taken of my site in real time. This means that there will not be 1 broken link on the site. But I have no control over Google and they will still think them pages exist and will still send visitors to them pages even though they no longer exist. They will keep sending visitors until they update their index. The thing is this will happen often as it is a shopping price comparison where merchants come and go all the time.
Ok so in googles index there will be broken links but not actually on the site, i doubt that will matter then since there not seeing any broken links when they spider your site.
you have no control over the pages you link to....if it was internal links then you should be worried