How do broken internal links affect the PageRank calculation?

[kevin_t]

My site has some 404 internal links. Does LinkJuice include those in the PageRank calculation or ignore them?

[laura_m]

By default they're included in the graph but the 404 destination pages are effectively black holes — they receive equity but don't redistribute it (no outbound links). This can inflate the apparent importance of broken destinations.

[mike_seo]

Filter the status code to 200-only before running analysis to see a clean picture of how equity flows through live pages only. Then separately review your 404 links — those are wasted equity that should be fixed or removed.

[Oliver]

Totally agree with the above. I'd also look at the outgoing links from your strongest pages. If your homepage links to 200+ things it loses focus. Cutting that list to 30-40 links concentrating on commercial pages made a noticeable difference for us.

[Dev]

Just adding a data point: we did this analysis for an 80,000-page e-commerce site and the run time was under 2 minutes in Chrome. No issues at all. The orphan detection alone saved us probably 15 hours of manual audit work.