: Thousands of broken external links - SEO penalization? I'm facing a SEO problem: I'm wondering if manually fixing/removing broken external links (pointing to expired domains, 404 pages, etc... of

@Heady270

Wether it's bad for SEO or not. Why would I (as a user) trust your content and other referral links if I already hit two broken links?

If I would hit a lot of broken links on Wikipedia again and again, I would think twice to select Wikipedia the next time I see them in my SERPs.

Regards, Peter

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@Kaufman445

Broken external - outgoing links can be considered as quality signal to your users but to search engines as well. If you have many broken links across website, that will lead to conclusion that the website is not updated for quite some time.

End result can lead to rank dropping and in some cases penalization (if we are talking about excessive external linking).

To avoid this kind of bad outcome, the best practice is to update those broken links or remove them completely from your website.

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