We know that links pointing to pages that do not exist, that 404 or some soft 404, are links that are not counted by Google - that is not new. But John Mueller of Google spoke about how sometimes you can redirect old 404 pages and that link may pass to the new page, even if that link is 404ed for years?
To be clear, a link that points to a 404ed page does not count. If that page is 404ed for a year or so, and then you add a redirect, I highly doubt Google will begin to count that link again. But John Mueller said that in some cases, if the links to the two year old 404ed page are super strong, that maybe Google will count it again after you redirect it. Or maybe he was being nice to the person asking the question?
John said "I'd say for for a certain while you can still go back and add a redirect for those individual links that you see like that. I don't know if after two years it would make a big difference unless there are really strong links that are going to your site and kind of being lost like that."
This question and answer came up at the 19:43 mark in the video hangout from last Friday:
Here is the transcript:
SEO: Another question is about the broken links on our website where our website has around 40k in pages and doubled the links. So we have around 20k of broken links caused by a migration gone bad from a platform to another platform. Since then we started noticing decrease in organic traffic. We used to rank let's say for 20k, 25k per day in organic traffic...
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