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crawl-errors

If you didn’t see this yet, check it out: Google Webmaster Tools (free and highly recommended) now provides a report of inbound links pointing to nonexistent pages to your site.

Inbound links drive traffic and rankings. Inbound links are precious. Allowing inbound links to fail on nonexistent pages is a marketing crime.

Once you’ve found your inbound broken links, you can contact the site linking to you to fix them. Smarter: handle it on your side, routing the traffic where you want to send it by (re)creating the appropriate page. Smarter still: issue a 301 permanently moved redirect and flip the traffic to where it should go.

Ignore broken inbound links long enough and they’ll go away. Bad. Sad.

Thanks, Google engineers, for these valuable data.

Link: Helping Website Owners Fix Broken Links, GoogleBlog

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  1. Christian Little, October 23, 2008:

    I love Google Webmaster Tools. There’s even a section in it that shows you your pagerank distribution across your entire site, very cool stuff :) My favorite part is th search data, they tell you the top ranking terms that people searched for your site for :)

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  1. Pingback: 404 - handling errors and page not founds in a better way | Tom Altman's Conversation on October 30, 2008

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