Letting Google know about broken links I've fixed

By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: June 4, 2016

Last night I spent some time going through my Google Webmaster's account, and found a listing of a large number of links I had broken on this website, largely because I removed the old, stale "directory" I had on this site. That was a Yahoo-style phonebook directory that made sense in 1999, but doesn't make much sense in 2011.

After taking quite some time to fix all those broken links with "Redirect 301" statements, I began to wonder, How will Google learn that I have fixed all of those broken links? Surely over time they will crawl all the pages that led them to those broken links, but looking at their stats, that process could take months, and I'd like to let them know they're fixed today.

To that end, I thought I'd create this blog post containing all the old links, and see if that helps (or somehow hurts). So, here are all the broken links I fixed last night with 301 redirect statements:

This is a list of all the old URLs, which now forward to new URLs. I've tried to make these as accurate as possible, but at some point the only I'll be able to do is resurrect the old data from old backups, and restore them on web pages here, if necessary.

Again, I don't know if this is a good idea, but I thought it might help speed up the process of helping Google and other search engines learn that I've done what I can to fix these broken links.

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Letting Google know about broken links I've fixed

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