404 errors How to deal with a large number of broken internal links for SEO

Question

I have recently updated my website. In fact I have completely rewritten it using wordpress. It was originally constructed using ASP. In the process, I have recycled a a large amount of my original website.

This resulted in a large amount of broken links. Google webmaster tools report more than 30000 broken links and most of them are internal. These mainly result from there being reported links to urls not used anymore. That is links to scrapped, obsolete url from the previous version that does not exist any more.

From SEO perspective I have read that if 404 errors are from internal links, it is best to delete the links. When I click on a broken link from the list displayed at health-> crawl errors, google shows me where this broken link appears at 'linked from' tab. When I click on links from 'linked from' , the purported broken link is not displayed on the 'linked from' page. That is the users of my website has no chance of trying to load this broken link. The broken link still shows up in page source. i.e. when i try view page source from chrome. The broken link is usually used in some javascript

To clafiry, let www.myhomepage/broken_link be the broken link reported by google webmaster tools. The google 'linked from' tab shows that this url was linked from www.myhomepage/some_other_page.

When I view the page source, the broken link is usually in

[script type="text/javascript"]var _bpfbRootUrl="www.myhomepage/broken_link";[/script]

Again, i read that it is advisable to just delete internal broken links, but there are just so many of them and it would be very time consuming to manually delete each and every of them.

What would be the best way to deal with this situation? I would like to avoid using custom 404 page. 302 does not seem like an option either, parsing url using regular expression to not redirect valid pages seem very complicated too

Google webmaster tools report that index on my page had been sharply declining since it was rewritten with wordpress and dropped to 10% of original.

Thank You.

Answer 1

From SEO perspective I have read that if 404 errors are from internal links, it is best to delete the links.

Where did you read that? That's just plain wrong. Make sure that ALL your obsolete links are properly redirected to the next best possible match. At least make the links redirect to some page of yours, so you won't lose linkjuice.

parsing url using regular expression to not redirect valid pages seem very complicated too

Doesn't have to be complicated. It really depends on your website structure and how the broken links are built. It's impossible to say without seeing the links. If you can provide some more details about these broken links, we might be able to help.

In fact I have completely rewritten it using wordpress.

If you are using Wordpress, there is a marvelous plugin, called SEO Ultimate. It comes pre-packages with a 404-Monitor which is able to automatically redirect found 404 error to the next best match page within your Wordpress installation.

Google webmaster tools report that index on my page had been sharply declining since it was rewritten with wordpress and dropped to 10% of original.

This can mean anything, really. Did you code your Wordpress theme yourself? Did you buy it somewhere? Is is properly SEO'ed? Does it have Meta-information, microformats, alt- and title-attributes to links, is it properly coded, etc.? Perhaps the site is just set to noindex. Possibilities for declining SEO performance can be many ...