We all know (or at least everyone who owns/runs a website should know) that links are the currency of the web. Just as a healthy cash flow makes a business successful, a healthy inbound 'link flow' will mean your website will grow in size. Its all down to something so simple yet at the same time the hardest to do! Getting links will make your website gain positions in the SERPs but getting that all important deeplink with relevant keyword anchor text from a quality and highly relevant site can be a serious challenge.
However, you cannot forget the multitude of links that appear as part of the organic growth of your site. I.e. the links that other people have done for you. But what happens if the links suddenly become broken or set up incorrectly? How would you know or be able to check each of them to see if they are correct? Google Webmaster tools has a new inclusion to help with this problem.
Take for example a e-commerce site that I work on that sells mobility aids. As part of the continual development we recently changed the menu and the way the products were categorised, and as a result changed the URL of the category from walking frames to the better targeted zimmer frames. This would mean that anything linking to the old URL was bound to bring up a 404 and some annoyed web users. Now here comes the best part...
Log into your Webmaster Tools (I have to mention again that this is essential to have) and go to the Diagnostics tab, and then click on Web Crawl. You should see the pages that return 404 errors in the image below...
On the right you'll see the new addition of the pages that this page links from (circled in red). Perfect! Once you click on this you'll get a popup that displays all the websites and/or pages that link to the old page.
Now all that remains is to go to each place and fix the broken link. This might mean taking time asking webmasters politely and asking if they can possibly update the link or simply fixing the link yourself. It may sound like a tedious task but this will improve not only the traffic to your site but also increase the number of URLs listed in Google. Now that has to be worth the time?
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