So I added a sitewide link the other day to another person's site and much to my dismay I found out that after that my site rankings plummeted! Like EVERY keyword I ranked for was suddenly dropped! :'( Although today I noticed that I was now ranking high for other new keywords and my old keywords are starting to go back to their original positions and it turns out that I have gained a few spots on several of them! I was wondering if any one else had ever had the same sort of experiences with 1 broken link? I only fixed it last night, but today my site is ranking again. Although it could have been because of my other efforts to clean up my site. Like removing the duplicate content issue with wordpress and optimizing my site so that it loads a lot faster and making sure that my robots.txt is all up to date.
That depends on the size of your site. If it is a 1 page site with 1 total link and that link is broken, it could make a difference. On a large site, no.
i think so too. On a large site like myspace or facebook there are probabyl thousands of broken links. If 1 broken link would ruin performance those were gone by a long time.
I think it can bring down your reputation (that's what I heard, anyway). But if it's just one, it shouldn't affect your site's performance.