If you have a lot of links to your site, but some of those links are pointing to pages that no longer exist and serve a 404 not found status code – those links technically are not helping or hurting your site in Google Search. John Mueller of Google said on Twitter if “link goes nowhere, so we drop it.”

John explained this as if “you recommend something that doesn’t exist anymore, it’s really a useful recommendation, right?” Same thing with links, if Google finds links that lead to something that no longer exists, is that a useful recommendation? The answer is no and Google does not count them.

Here are those tweets:

This is not new, Google said links to 404s don’t hurt your, even soft 404s – it is something we covered a lot here.

Can you fix the link after?

Forum discussion at Twitter.