Comments on: Google Webmaster Tools Now Reveals Crawl Error Sources

By: John at WebsiteBuildingBiz

John at WebsiteBuildingBiz — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:01:00 +0000

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.

By: Downloads

Downloads — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 07:22:29 +0000

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.

By: Sandie Metzger

Sandie Metzger — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 13:03:45 +0000

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

By: Diamonds

Diamonds — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:04:15 +0000

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

By: Kalena Jordan

Kalena Jordan — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:23:30 +0000

@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!

By: Where did that 404 link Come From? | Computer Tips - Tech Info and Internet Security, Windows, Linux, Mac and other Tech Info from Avery J. Parker

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 13:29:37 +0000

[...] errors when spidering your site. Now with the sitemaps and webmaster tools utility they’ll show you where the link was woohoo…. I’m glad to see that I’ve been running into a few 404 errors from time [...]

By: Robert

Robert — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 10:54:26 +0000

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.

By: Warren Duff

Warren Duff — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 01:03:13 +0000

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

By: Google Webmaster Tools Now Reveals Crawl Error Sources | BiggestLobster.com

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 11:10:00 +0000

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By: Google Webmaster Tools Now Reveals Crawl Error Sources | Search Engine Optimization

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 08:41:50 +0000

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