Recovering Lost Links

Sites change, people make mistakes, and both of these facts can result in broken links.  Luckily for you, a new tool from Google is able to detect when links lead to 404 pages on your site.  Get the links fixed, and you may see some improved rankings and extra traffic.

We’ll let Google’s Matt Cutts “back up and give you a little history” at this point.  He writes, “When someone comes to your site’s webserver and asks for a page that doesn’t exist . . . most web servers are configured to return an HTTP status code of 404, which means that the page was ‘Not Found.’”

Cutts then continues, “If someone links to a page on your site that doesn’t exist, most webservers give a pretty sucky experience: visitors usually land on a pretty useless page, and search engines might not give you full credit for those 404 errors.”

So it’s very much in your best interest to visit Google’s webmaster portal and find out where those faulty links are coming from.  Just register your site and click through the diagnostics options until reaching “not found.”

The problems won’t be fixed at this point, of course; you’ll still need to write a few emails and see if people will change their links.  But since the people apparently felt you deserved the links in the first place, this step shouldn’t be a big deal.

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