• majorAlexa

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI
          Moz Local

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
          Moz Pro

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

          Learn more
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
          Moz API

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. SEO Tactics
        3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
        4. Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?

        Moz Q&A is closed.

        After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

        Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?

        Intermediate & Advanced SEO
        5
        8
        5672
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • M_D_Golden_Peak
          M_D_Golden_Peak last edited by

          Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this.

          When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost?

          We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name).

          Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • M_D_Golden_Peak
            M_D_Golden_Peak @NakulGoyal last edited by

            First off, thanks everyone for your replies 🙂

            I'm well versed in best practices of 301 redirects, sitemaps, etc, etc. In other words, I fully know the optimal way to handle this. But, this is one of those situations where there are so many redirects involved (thousands) for a large site, that I want to make sure that what we are doing is fully worth the development time.

            We are migrating a large website that was already migrated to a different CMS several years ago. There are thousands of legacy 301 redirects already in place for the current site, and many of those pages that are being REDIRECTED TO (from the old URL versions) receive very little/if any traffic. We need to decide if the work of redirecting them is worth it.

            I'm not as worried about broken links for pages that don't get any traffic (although we ideally want 0 broken links). What I am most worried about, however, is losing domain authority and the whole site potentially ranking a little bit lower overall as a result.

            Nakul's response (and Frederico's) are closest to what I am asking...but everyone is suggesting the same thing...that we will lose domain authority (example measurement: SEOmoz's OpenSiteExplorer domain authority score) if we don't keep those redirects in place (but of course, avoiding double redirects).

            So, thanks again to everyone on this thread 🙂 If anyone has a differing opinion, I'd love to hear it...but this is pretty much what I expected: everyone's best educated assessment is that you will lose domain authority when 301 redirects are lifted and broken links are the end result.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • NakulGoyal
              NakulGoyal last edited by

              Great question Dan. @Jesse, you are on the right track. I think the question was misunderstood.

              The question is, if seomoz.org links to Amazon.com/nakulgoyal and that page does not exist, is there link juice flow ? Think about it. It's like thinking about a citation. If seomoz.org mentions amazon.com/nakulgoyal, but does not actually have the hyperlink, is there citation flow.

              So my question to the folks is, is there citation flow ? In my opinion, the answer is yes. There's some DA that will get passed along. Eventually, the site owner might identify the 404, "which they should" and setup a 301 redirect from Amazon.com/nakulgoyal to whatever pages makes most sense for the user, in which case there will be a proper link juice flow.

              So to clarify what I said:

              • Scenario 1:
                SiteA.com links to SiteB.com/urldoesnotexist - There is some (maybe close to negligible) domain authority flow. from siteA.com to siteB.com (Sort of like a link citation). There may not be a proper link juice flow, because the link is broken.

              • Scenario 2:
                SiteA.com links to SiteB.com/urldoesnotexist and this URL is 301 redirected SiteB.com/urlexists - In this case, there is both a authority flow and a link juice flow from SiteA.com to SiteB.com/urlexists

              **That's my opinion. Think about it, the 301 redirect from /urldoesnotexist to /urlexists might get added 1 year from now and might be mistakenly removed at some point temporarily. There's going to be an affect in both cases. So in my opinion, the crux is, watch your 404's and redirect them when you and when it makes sense for the user. That way you have a good user experience and you can have the link juice flow where it should. **

              M_D_Golden_Peak 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • Bryan_Loconto
                Bryan_Loconto @M_D_Golden_Peak last edited by

                Ideally you want to keep the number of 404 pages low because it tells the search engine that the page is a dead end, ask any SEO, it's best to keep the number of 404's as low as possible.

                Link equity tells Google why to rank a page or give the root domain more authority. However, Google does not want users to end up on dead pages. So it will not help the site, rather hurt it. My recommendation is to create a sitemap and submit to Google WMT with the pages you want the spiders to index.

                Limit the 404's as much as possible and try to 301 them if possible to a relevant page (from a user perspective).

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • jesse-landry
                  jesse-landry last edited by

                  I think, and correct me if I'm wrong Dan, you guys are misunderstanding the question.

                  He means that if you do actually create a 404 page for all your broken links to land on, will the juice pass from there to your domain (housing the 404 page) and on to whatever internal links you've built into said 404 page.

                  The answer, I think, is no. Reason for this is 404 is a status code returned before the 404 page is produced. Link juice can pass through either links (200) or redirects (301).

                  Again... I THINK.

                  Was this more what you were asking?

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                  • FedeEinhorn
                    FedeEinhorn @M_D_Golden_Peak last edited by

                    Equity is passed to a 404 page, which does not exist, therefore that equity is lost.

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                    • M_D_Golden_Peak
                      M_D_Golden_Peak @Bryan_Loconto last edited by

                      Thanks, Bryan. This doesn't really answer the exact question, though: is link equity still passed (and domain authority preserved) by broken links producing 404 Error Pages?

                      FedeEinhorn Bryan_Loconto 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 1
                      • Bryan_Loconto
                        Bryan_Loconto last edited by

                        No they don't. Search engine spiders follow the link as a user, if the pages no longer exist and you cannot forward the user to a better page then create a good 404 page that will keep the users intrigued.

                        M_D_Golden_Peak 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • 1 / 1
                        • First post
                          Last post

                        Browse Questions

                        Explore more categories

                        • Moz Tools

                          Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                        • SEO Tactics

                          Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                        • Community

                          Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                        • Digital Marketing

                          Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                        • Research & Trends

                          Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                        • Support

                          Connect on product support and feature requests.

                        • See all categories

                        Related Questions

                        • Caffeine_Marketing

                          Internal links to landing pages

                          Hi, we are in the process of building a new website and we have 12 different locations and for theses 12 locations we have landing pages with unique copy on the following: 1. Marketing...2 SEO....3. PPC....4. Web Design Therefor there are 48 landing pages.  The marketing pages are the most important ones to us in terms of traffic and priority.  My question is: 1. Should we put a dropdown of the are pages in the main header under locations that link to the area marketing pages? 2. What is the best way to link all the sub pages such as London Web Design?  Should these links just be coming off the London marketing page? or should we have a sitemap in the footer that lists every page? Thanks

                          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing
                          0
                        • DougRoberts

                          Embedding PDF previews and maintaining crawlability/link-equity.

                          One site that I'm working on has previously had a great deal of success from the pdf preview content on the site. The pdf previews are quite substantial and rank for many many long-tail terms that drive a reasonable amount of traffic back to the site to purchase the full version of the product. As part of a site redesign, the way the pdf previews are embedded/presented on the page is changing slightly: The proposed modal pop-up on the new site the code looks like thie: <object data="my-pdf-preview.pdf" type="application/pdf" style="width:100%; min-height:600px; max-height:100%;max-height:100%;"><embed src="my-pdf-preview.pdf" type="application/pdf"></object> Where as the old code looked like this: <object data="mt-pdf-previewpreview.pdf#view=FitH,50&scrollbar=1&toolbar=0&statusbar=0&messages=0&navpanes=0" <br="">type='application/pdf'
                          width='100%'
                          height='600'> It appears your Web browser is not configured to display PDF files. No worries, you can download the PDF file here.</object> Note: how previously the code contained a plain, standard link to the pdf document. My worry is that without this link, search engines won't a) be able to discover/crawl the pdf content or b) pass any link-equity to these pdfs. Does anyone have any experience/recommendations about this? I'd like to have some information before I request that they add a plain link to the pdf previews back onto the on-page content.

                          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DougRoberts
                          0
                        • BrandExpSteve

                          Is their value in linking to PPC landing pages and using rel="canonical"

                          I have ppc landing pages that are similar to my seo page. The pages are shorter with less text with a focus on converting visitors further along in the purchase cycle. My questions are: 1. Is there a benefit for having the orphan ppc pages indexed or should I no index them? 2. If indexing does provide benefits, should I create links from my site to the ppc pages or should I just submit them in a sitemap? 3. If indexed, should I use rel="canonical" and point the ppc versions to the appropriate organic page? Thanks,

                          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandExpSteve
                          0
                        • lcourse

                          Is it a problem to use a 301 redirect to a 404 error page, instead of serving directly a 404 page?

                          We are building URLs dynamically with apache rewrite.
                          When we detect that an URL is matching some valid patterns, we serve a script which then may detect that the combination of parameters in the URL does not exist. If this happens we produce a 301 redirect to another URL which serves a 404 error page, So my doubt is the following: Do I have to worry about not serving directly an 404, but redirecting (301) to a 404 page? Will this lead to the erroneous original URL staying longer in the google index than if I would serve directly a 404? Some context. It is a site with about 200.000 web pages and we have currently 90.000 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (even though only 600 detected last month).

                          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
                          0
                        • Kingalan1

                          Effect of Removing Footer Links In all Pages Except Home Page

                          Dear MOZ Community: In an effort to improve the user interface of our business website (a New York CIty commercial real estate agency) my designer eliminated a standardized footer containing links to about 20 pages. The new design maintains this footer on the home page, but all other pages (about 600 eliminate the footer). The new design does a very good job eliminating non essential items. Most of the changes remove or reduce the size of unnecessary design elements. The footer removal is the only change really effect the link structure. The new design is not launched yet. Hoping to receive some good advice from the MOZ community before proceeding My concern is that removing these links could have an adverse or unpredictable effect on ranking. Last Summer we launched a completely redesigned version of the site and our ranking collapsed for 3 months. However unlike the previous upgrade this modifications does not URL names, tags, text or any major element. Only major change is the footer removal. Some of the footer pages provide good (not critical) info for visitors. Note the footer will still appear on the home page but will be removed on the interior pages. Are we risking any detrimental ranking effect by removing this footer? Can we compensate by adding text links to these pages if the links from the footer are removed? Seems irregular to have a home page footer but no footer on the other pages. Are we inviting any downgrade, penalty, adverse SEO effect by implementing this? I very much like the new design but do not want to risk a fall in rank and traffic. Thanks for your input!!!
                          Alan

                          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
                          0
                        • Mark_Ch

                          Link Juice + multiple links pointing to the same page

                          Scenario
                          The website has a menu consisting of 4 links Home | Shoes | About Us | Contact Us Additionally within the body content we write about various shoe types. We create a link with the anchor text "Shoes" pointing to www.mydomain.co.uk/shoes In this simple example, we have 2 instances of the same link pointing to the same url location.
                          We have 4 unique links.
                          In total we have 5 on page links. Question
                          How many links would Google count as part of the link juice model?
                          How would the link juice be weighted in terms of percentages?
                          If changing the anchor text in the body content to say "fashion shoes" have a different impact? Any other advise or best practice would be appreciated. Thanks Mark

                          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
                          0
                        • Netrepid

                          Do I need to use rel="canonical" on pages with no external links?

                          I know having rel="canonical" for each page on my website is not a bad practice... but how necessary is it for pages that don't have any external links pointing to them? I have my own opinions on this, to be fair - but I'd love to get a consensus before I start trying to customize which URLs have/don't have it included. Thank you.

                          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netrepid
                          0
                        • Found

                          Generating 404 Errors but the Pages Exist

                          Hey I have recently come across an issue with several of a sites urls being seen as a 404 by bots such as Xenu, SEOMoz, Google Web Tools etc. The funny thing is, the pages exist and display fine. This happens on many of the pages which use the Modx CMS, but the index is fine. The wordpress blog in /blog/ all works fine. The only thing I can think of is that I have a conflict in the htaccess, but troubleshooting this is difficult, any tool I have found online seem useless. Have tried to rollback to previous versions but still does not work. Anyone had any experience of similar issues? Many thanks K.

                          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Found
                          0

                        Get started with Moz Pro!

                        Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                        Start my free trial
                        Products
                        • Moz Pro
                        • Moz Local
                        • Moz API
                        • Moz Data
                        • STAT
                        • Product Updates
                        Moz Solutions
                        • SMB Solutions
                        • Agency Solutions
                        • Enterprise Solutions
                        • Digital Marketers
                        Free SEO Tools
                        • Domain Authority Checker
                        • Link Explorer
                        • Keyword Explorer
                        • Competitive Research
                        • Brand Authority Checker
                        • Local Citation Checker
                        • MozBar Extension
                        • MozCast
                        Resources
                        • Blog
                        • SEO Learning Center
                        • Help Hub
                        • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                        • How-to Guides
                        • Moz Academy
                        • API Docs
                        About Moz
                        • About
                        • Team
                        • Careers
                        • Contact
                        Why Moz
                        • Case Studies
                        • Testimonials
                        Get Involved
                        • Become an Affiliate
                        • MozCon
                        • Webinars
                        • Practical Marketer Series
                        • MozPod
                        Connect with us

                        Contact the Help team

                        Join our newsletter
                        Moz logo
                        © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                        • Accessibility
                        • Terms of Use
                        • Privacy

                        Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.