Broken links
:in Google Webmaster Tools
Broken links
The Google webmaster tools has recently added a brand new feature which lets users to see the sources of links which trigger a “file not found†on your site. In order to test this new feature, simply click on your site in the dashboard (provided you have already completed their verification process) and view Diagnostics -> Web crawl -> Not found. Next to a given unfound URL – say, “http://example.com/archive%3E†– you can click the “pages†link to the right, which will pop up a list of sites referencing that URL*. Often the link is just malformed and the error won’t be on your end.
Google Engineer Matt Cutts explains that this new feature may allow you to get what amounts to a free backlink – because you can contact the webmaster who has linked to you wrongly and ask them to correct their link URL. This kind of work only seems to make sense for major backlinks though, not so much for normal links.
