Interferon Posted May 23, 2017 Share Posted May 23, 2017 I believe Google penalizes broken links, and there's no way to avoid this if your community has been around for a while and gone through changes. A tool to evaluate posts and remove broken links within the community URL would be helpful. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
opentype Posted May 23, 2017 Share Posted May 23, 2017 If content disappears the page needs to give the proper response (404, moved permanently and so on) and then Google knows hot to treat these pages. I wouldn’t know that you would have to remove links. And I also wouldn’t do that automatically. Even broker links give useful information about the target page. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sobrenome Posted July 3, 2019 Share Posted July 3, 2019 Broken links are very bad for user experience. A tool to remove broken links in posts would be nice. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
opentype Posted July 3, 2019 Share Posted July 3, 2019 The original post was about “Google penalizing”, which I’m sure doesn’t exist the way it is claimed. That’s what I addressed and nothing else. Not sure what confused you about that. User experience is a different issue altogether. And we could debate how good removing links would be for user experience. If anything, broken links could be marked with a warning, greyed out or whatever — not removed. As said before, one can still retrieve valuable information from the URL and if it’s gone completely it only confuses the reader. Heck, posts may only consist of a single URL or just say “Look here: ” and then nothing else when the URL gets removed. How is that good user experience? Also, keep in mind that URLs might just be down temporarily. So removing them would be a dangerous action in this case. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ahc Posted July 3, 2019 Share Posted July 3, 2019 2 hours ago, opentype said: If anything, broken links could be marked with a warning, greyed out or whatever — not removed. As said before, one can still retrieve valuable information from the URL and if it’s gone completely it only confuses the reader. Heck, posts may only consist of a single URL or just say “Look here: ” and then nothing else when the URL gets removed. How is that good user experience? Also, keep in mind that URLs might just be down temporarily. So removing them would be a dangerous action in this case. Agree 100%. As both an owner and consumer/member of various communities, it would help me more to see a disabled link to understand the context of the content I'm reading rather than a post with information partially redacted, or even entirely empty. This is also the first time I've ever seen anything about Google penalizing for broken links? Are you meaning internal links or links to off-site content unrelated to your website? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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