What would you say if I told you there is a very simple way to see if you are missing out on an inbound link to your blog or website? My guess is that you would ask me to tell you more, as all blogs and websites need as many links as they can possibly get, right?
Well, this “trick” is fairly simple, as long as you have a Google Webmaster Tools account and your blog is passing data to it.
As a site develops pages will be moved, deleted or renamed. If there is a link pointing to one of those moved, deleted or renamed pages and somebody clicks on that link, the user will get a 404 error message. This is logged in your GWT account and, what’s more, the link that has been clicked to create the 404 error is also recorded.
This information could prove to be very valuable to you, especially if the page linking to your broken page is well ranked and passing link juice. As your page is broken this link juice is being lost, now you know there is a problem with it you can take steps to fix it and recoup some of that lost link love.
This is how to check if your site is creating 404 error pages and how to find out where those clicks are coming from
1) Log into your Google Webmaster Tools account and select the site (if you have more than one) you would like to check.
2) On the dashboard for each site in Google Webmaster Tools are four options
- Site configuration
- Your site on the web
- Diagnostics
- Labs
3) The section you want to look in is Diagnostics, from the sub-menu that appears you want Crawl Errors. Now look across the row of links for Not found () (inside the brackets will be a number, this is the amount of 404 errors Google has found) and click.
4) What you will see, if Google is finding any errors when crawling your site, is a list of URLs that are sending traffic to a non existent page on your site. If you look to the right of the URL you should see the “Linked from” column. This will show how many pages are linking to the non existent page, click the link and those pages will be revealed.
Some of the pages listed here may be pages from your own site. These are easily fixed, but you may also come across pages from other sites that are not quite so easily fixed. When I performed this check I found links from forums and some other pages I felt I would not be able to have any control over, but there were one or two links that could be fixed by sending a quick email request to the website owner explaining that they were linking to a non existent page and asking them to link to an alternative page.
Once you have done this check you probably won’t have to bother again for another few months, unless you make some drastic changes to your site.
Other posts you might like to read
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