Check For Broken Backlinks
:in Webmaster Central
Check For Broken Backlinks
The Google webmaster tools has recently added a brand new feature that lets all webmasters see the sources of links which trigger a “file not found†or 404 error on your server. To try this, click on your site name in the Google Webmaster Central Dashboard and then click on 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 pops up a list of sites referencing that URL. Often the link is just malformed and the error won’t be on your end.
Google’s Head of Web Spam Team, Matt Cutts suggests that this this new feature may allow you to get what amounts to a free backlink – because you can ping the wrongly-linking webmaster and ask them to correct their link URL (and perhaps specify your preferred anchor text). This kind of work only seems to make sense for major backlinks though, so it would be more useful with indicators of the traffic the broken page gets, or the source’s PageRank.
