I know that broken links do negatively affect rankings a little, especially if they are making it hard for a spider to crawl. But has anyone noticed fixing every broken link actually noticably helping their rankings? It am trying to do back-to-basics types of things as I wait for Jagger to end, and among them is going in and fixing old broken links. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
I would think for the sake of quality that you should get rid of any broken links. I'm not sure how it would effect your position in google, but personally I can stand clicking on a broken link. I would just change them all for you visitors in general.
It could possibly affect google since it would also try to spider those links and find them useless. But you definitely have to get those broken links fixed so as not to disappoint your visitors when they click on those links and find themselves nowhere.
Huge sites have broken links all the time. Yahoo, DMOZ, nytimes all come to mind. Doesn't hurt them. I'd say try to find and fix for the visitors sake, but I wouldn't stress over em.
I don't believe having broken links is a major issue for search engines unless they are the internal links pointing at your site. If you have changed your internal pages without updating links then you will obviously lose those freebie links. Beyond that, I would just echo the fact that your visitors may be turned off by the broken links.
I had a site dropped but not penalized from Google once and was searching for why when I discoverd the link to the privacy policy was BROKEN DOH!! Fixed it and it was reindexed a few weeks later only to be slowly deindexed over time (affiliate site).... my story take what you will...
I would suggest running Web LINK VALIDATOR(http://www.relsoftware.com/wlv/) on your site and see if u have any broken links that need fixing. The trial version can check upto 500 links or you can go for the licenced version that costs 95 bucks for 2000 links.