I'm not "battling red rep". I'm "battling" the statements about a "broken link penalty", including the anonymous one, which remain unsupported at this point.
Pick a myth. Any myth. I'm sure I can find at least one post on one forum somewhere where somebody says it's true. The usual evolution is as follows: 1. somebody posts, "I wonder if Google penalizes broken links?" 2. somebody else posts somewhere else, "I read on another forum that Google penalizes broken links" 3. within a few months, someone else is posting, "It is a well-known fact that Google penalizes broken links" 4. somebody reading all this fixes a couple of broken links, sees an improvement in rankings at some point, and posts, "Hey! It's true! I just fixed a couple of broken links and my rankings improved! Google DOES penalize broken links!" ... and so it goes. But it's still a myth.
I'm not disagreeing at all. I think its bunk that google would penalize for broken links. Most of the big sites have dead links all over the place, I don't see them disappearing. I've had a dead link on my site for over a year (just realized it yesterday) and I've never been hurt by it. Conversely, fixing a few dead links hasn't helped either.
well some of you have asked for results from LV I have 16,536 static one way Links placed to 3,992 different URLS on one domain. 1,971 top 30's in google to one domain using 10,512 links and 11,985 Vaults Of the top 30s I have 375 #1's in google I receive over 100 referrals from google every day don't track ranking in yahoo or msn. Started in LV on 19 Apr 2005 site will be 1 year old in November.
Here is some more info for anyone interested: We have gained 3,942 static links... gradually since joining Link Vault... which has equated to 10,210 vaults so far. The links have been invested in 3 sites, a number of sub domains and a few blogs. At the moment I'm concentrating on making the links added as natural as possible... acquiring the links gradually, to internal pages as well as the homepage and using a lot of variety in the anchor text. In terms of results, our sites are dominant in their sectors on yahoo and msn... typically top 5 or #1 for their money terms, google is top 15 for money terms and lots of longer tail #1's. They were well established sites prior to joining... LV has just made them more competitive and pretty much dominant in yahoo and msn.