Hi everyone, I was looking at my Google Webmaster Tools earlier today and saw a high number of web crawl errors found on my site. There's about 6000 pages not found, 30 unreachable URLs...I'm wondering if this is having any effect on how Google indexes my site and thus my ranking. Any answer would be appreciated. Thank you. Thomas.
Of course it will affect your inclusion to google and ranking in SERPs, because they are broken links. This means google tried to crawl your page but it's not reachable, do you think google will index such a page?
It will effect! I had 1000+ errors previously. (my inner pages disapeared) and i missed lots of traffic from google. But dont worry too much, if you fix the errors, you will see some increase in traffic later again.
Fixing broken links is also a part of SEO. You can never reach your site's full potential if it has broken links.
Thank you for your quick responses, I also wanted to know if Google spider would stop crawling the rest of my site once it saw something not found or unreachable?
It's ok if there ARE broken links but it is NOT OK if Google for some reason screws up the links when they crawl. I see weird links that I don't even have on my site and links that was removed years ago showing up as unreachable. Not sure what's going on but I saw the same when they had their last screwup!
Agreed. I have no broken links on my site but this week google has been reporting a couple of errors for non existant pages. Weird. Has been ok for months!
Same here. No broken links on my site, but google reporting broken links on my site that doesn't even exist and never have.
Increasing of the broken links is the decreasing of the frequency of the checks. I suggest you to fix the links as soon as possible if you really care about Google.