Ever since Google Webmaster Tools started reporting on broken links to a site, webmasters have been asking for the sources of those links. Today, Google has delivered. From Webmaster Tools you can now see the page that each broken link is coming from. This information should be of great help for webmasters in ensuring the visitors find their sites and that their links are properly credited.
The value of the 404 error report
Why does Google report broken links in the first place? As Googlebot crawls the web, it stores a list of all the links it finds. It then uses that list for a couple of things:
- As the source list to crawl more pages on the web
- To help calculate PageRank
Read more on Search Engine Land
Tags: Google Webmaster Tools, Linking
