Web Crawl New Feature - How to find Missing Links

Google introduced a web crawl feature to its webmaster tools. The tool provides a list of 404 errors from broken inbound links. Fixing these links could help improve your ranking in the search results. When the Googlebot tries to crawl those links from other sites, and there is a non found page your website doesn’t get any benefit for that link. Further is not pleasant for your visitors not to be able to find what they are searching.

Matt Cutts post Free Direct text Links provides useful information of how to identify these links.

According to Matt Cutts, ‘the simple reason is that if someone is linking to a non-existent page on your site, it can be a bad experience for users (not to mention that you might not be getting credit for that link with search engines unless you’re doing extra work). Some of the easiest links you’ll ever get are when people tried to link to you and just messed up. It would be trivial to mail some of these people and say “Hey, I noticed you linked to my site (thank you!) but the link is broken, so users will get a 404 page. Would you mind changing your link on page A to point to the right page, which is url B?” When the other site fixes their link, their visitors find your site directly, plus all search engines can follow those links and give you credit for them. Converting 404 links to links to the right pages converts sucky links to free direct text links for all.’ Just login or create a webmaster Google account login and select Diagnostics and Web Crawl.

With the new tool every webmaster would able to control broken links and the whom is trying to link to their websites.

Web Crawl

Below is an example of www.seothoughts.co.uk, showing to broken links and from where are linked from

www.seothoughts.co.uk