Chinese webmasters are paying more and more attention to broken links or dead links, because such links are directly related to indexing and traffic conversion of websites. And here are official replies from Baidu to some questions about broken links.
Q: Is robots shielding effective for preventing Baidu from crawling broken links?
A: Of course, Baidu strictly follows robots protocol. If you find Baidu fetches broken links regardless of robots file, you should confirm that it is Baiduspider, if yes, you can make a complaint at the feedback center.
Q: Can a webmaster ask Baidu to delete indexes of broken links via robots shielding file?
A: This is not recommended; the best and quickest way is to handle them by “Broken Link Submission Tool” in Baidu Webmaster tool.
Q: I’ve submitted the indexes by the broken link tool, but I still see in my logs that Baidu fetches our broken links.
A: After you submit the rules, Baiduspider would need to fetch some links to confirm that they are truly broken.
Q: How would fetches of broken links affect indexes of normal content?
A: There isn’t any common standard for this. In case that you haven’t set robots or submit the rules to Baidu, and your site has a huge amount of broken links, these links would take up a big part of crawling quota of your website, and thus cause your normal content couldn’t be fetched. But if Baiduspider only fetches some content to verify your rules for broken links, then there would be no negative influence on normal content.
Q: What’s Baidu’s requirement for broken links? What are the best practices for setting broken links?
A: Baidu supports protocol broken links, content broken links and redirect broken links, and the most effective one is protocol broken links.
Q: Is there any tool in Baidu Webmaster tool that could help us find unknown broken links on our site?
A: You can use “Broken Link Analysis” function in the link analysis tool, and “Abnormal Fetches” tool to find and analyze broken links.