Hi Kalena

Good article – it is always great to get more information from Google.

However, you can also use your LOG files combined with some common sense. By looking at all the 404 errors in your logs, you can determine if it is bad request due to an external link or an internal link – that is where the common sense comes into it.

The discipline of looking at your logs is something that all webmasters should do.

I do agree that this feature means those webmasters who don’t have access to their logs, can now do the same thing.

Of course, neither method is going to pick up badly formed links at the domain level, because they are not going to be picked up as either a link to that domain, or as a request onto the server.

Cheers

Warren

Thanks for highlighting this Kalena. Matt’s post was quite informative and already I’m fixing a few bugs (or simply adding in 301′s).

Warren, while the logs are a good way of measuring most things this is Google telling you exactly what they are seeing. I’m mostly pleased as I optimise for Google only at this time (hey in South Africa people don’t even know what MSN is!) and this tells me exactly what they see, what they get and so on. Great news for me.

@Warren – thanks for your comment. I agree that savvy webmasters may know how to find 404 sources via their log files, but this Google feature makes the process a breeze for newbies and webmasters of very large sites. The downloadable Excel file means there is really no excuse now for broken links.

@Robert – glad you enjoyed the post, please keep reading SPN!

Good to know that they finally put a column Linked From, I had difficulty finding where these links came from.

I downloaded this excel file, but as a newbie I don’t know where to past it in my website. Can someone help me?

Yes, yes, yes! I have waited more than 1 year for this … Nothing more frustrating than seeing all those “URLs-not-found” msgs in WMT and *not* being able to identify and get the external links fixed!!

.D.

Its always great news when Google decides to share more of its information with us webmasters 301 is a great way to recover broken links quickly, and now its just that much easier to accomplish.