Is redirecting broken backlinks overrated?

[Greg Bernhardt]

I've always been a hawk for redirecting (legitimately) broken backlinks, but lately I can't in fact see any measurable impact. I've had a few large clients in 2020 where we restored hundreds of broken backlinks, many dozen well known media sites with 70+ DA according to ahrefs. Where do you all stand on this practice? I'm starting to think it doesn't matter one bit.

Maybe Rand is right. Links aren't that important anymore and broken links act like mentions.

 

[Rich Owings]

I remember seeing a study a few years back that showed a diminishing effect the longer the backlink was broken. The point was to be sure to add redirects when you do a migration. If I recall correctly, implementing them after six months had little effect. I believe this was a Moz study.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Very interesting, thanks Rich!

 

[BESeating]

Hi Greg,
I do believe you have a really good point there. At my current job my boss has asked me to repair some broken backlinks to an older website and it was similar to your experience. The websites had a high DR on Ahref, however it's been a month and a half after some of them were restored and I don't see any effect whatsoever. In my opinion it's significantly better to acquire new backlinks than rely on the old ones.

 

[Justin Mosebach]

Another factor to consider is: was the page the backlink is on indexed by Google... a while ago? Recently? If so, when's the last time it was crawled/indexed?

 

[msilvija75]

In general broken links are harming SEO, so you should always be on top of this issue. With redirects it's common to overdo it with long and unnecessary chains (at least i struggled with these a lot in the past. Now there are handy tools like https://linko.app/ that inform me instantly if my website faces any issues

 

[Berkay Aglar]

First of all, sorry for my poor english I think of the concept of backlinks by exemplifying from the real world.
Imagine you are a successful expert. Let people start praising and recommending you. But imagine that you upset a customer. Let him stop praising you and even start giving you bad feedback. I think the harm of losing backlinks is like in this example.