Free Webmaster Tools – How to Quickly Find Broken Links Within and Outside of Your Web Site

Are you aware of all the traffic you’re losing due to the broken links on your web site?

Visitors find your web site by following external links from other other sites or find information within your site by clicking on the internal links. If any of these links are broken you’ll lose visitors and potential sales.

When visitors get the dreaded “page not found” error it means one or more links on your web site are broken. This is referred to as a “crawl error.” Google discovers these errors while crawling your pages.

How to quickly find your broken links

1. Create a Free Google Webmaster Tools Account
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

2. Create and Submit a Site Map within your account

3. View the crawl reports

Here is the list Web crawl errors you’ll see:

Errors for URLs in Sitemaps
HTTP errors
Not found
URLs not followed
URLs restricted by robots.txt
URLs timed out
Unreachable URLs

Click on the links “Not Found” and “Errors for URLs in Sitemaps” reports. Look in the “Linked From” column. The “Linked From” column lists the number of pages that link to a specific “Not found” URL along with the date it was discovered. The error page (known as 404) can be within or external to your site.

Now you can find all the broken links that Google sees when crawling your web site and quickly determine if the cause is from within your site or from someone else’s site.

Resource

How to create a 404 error page

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