A bad link is a lost link - Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors

Isn't it wonderful when someone creates a link to a page of yours? You get some link love from Google and maybe even a boost in SERP (Search Engine Results Position).

You might get some new visitors who have never been to your pages before and some of them might even spend some money or turn into regulars. If the text surrounding that link is full of gushing praise for your (obvious) brilliance, well, that puts a spring in your step for a day or two, doesn't it?

Yes, sir, it is really nice to get an incoming link. Very nice of the people who created it to think of you, very nice of Google to give you some extra credit for it and very nice of those new visitors to have actually clicked on it. The world is just full of sunshine and singing birds.

What happens when they screw it up?

Hey, people make mistakes. Yes, they really should have cut and pasted from the address bar of their browser, but apparently they decided to trust their fingers instead and - ooops - they made a bit of a typo.

Guess what? You don't get anything out of that because the link doesn't work.

Well, that's not so good, is it?

Fortunately, your web server error log tracks these errors, so you could dig into those and find these missed opportunities. We'll get to what you can do about them in a minute, but first I'd like to mention that there is something far easier than looking through your error logs.

Google Webmaster Tools

If you have your own domain, you can get a lot of free advice and help at Google's Webmaster Tools site.  One of the things I find extremely useful is the Crawl Errors report.

Not only does Google show you pages that could not be found (404 errors), but it shows you the pages that have the bad links.  Everything is presented as hyperlinks, so you can just click to see the offending pages.

Now what?

So, now that we know that somebody at that other site has fat fingered the link. All you need to do is send them a polite email and they'll fix it right away and that's that.

Yeah, right. My guess would be that 999 times out of 1,000, your email would be ignored.

Oh, you might get lucky. If I was the one who screwed up your link, I would fix it within minutes of reading your email - polite or not. But at most sites your email is heading for the bit-bucket. Nobody cares, sorry.

Duplicate the page?

If your page was "foobah.html" and somebody linked to it as "foobar.html", you could just copy "foobah.html" to ""foobar.html". That's OK if it is the only choice you have, but most web servers have better tricks up their sleeves.

That's a good thing, too, because there are some linking errors you can't fix any other way.

Apache Redirects

A lot of the web runs on Apache. Most of the rest runs on Microsoft IIS, but there are other servers out there. I can't possibly tell you how to create redirects for every single one, but a bit of Googling should get you on the right path.

For example, searching for "microsoft iis redirects" brought me to this Technet article on that subject.

As for me, I run Apache and wouldn't have a Microsoft IIS server if you paid me to use it. In Apache, I can use a .htaccess file and fix errors very quickly.

For example, the error in the picture above is caused by linking to "dict.html." (extra "." after "html") instead of "dict.html". The fix for that could look like:

In reality, my .htaccess has many more lines in it, because this kind of error is common.

Because it's so common, and because there are many similar errors just as common, it is possible and tempting to write generic rules that will fix any bad incoming link for any of your pages.

Unfortunately, that's tricky. If you are not very careful, you can make things worse. However, it is something to consider and this "Guide to fixing duplicate content & URL issues on Apache" is a good place to start.

I do some things like that, but I don't do everything I could. My main reason is that I want to see the links. I want to know about them and then fix them.

Why? Because the source of the link and the link text is important. Sometimes that information tells me that I should add additional content to that particular page. Other times, it is plain that they picked the wrong page - I know that I have a better page for that specific link. Their screwing it up is a great opportunity, because now I can redirect it where I think it should go!

Custom 404 page

There's yet another way to handle errors. and that is a custom 404 error page.  I do that at my site too, but that does require programming knowledge, so we'll have to save that for a more technical article.

Google does screw up

You will find things in your report that are not real. I see that frequently and it is obvious that Google's software got confused somewhere and the actual link is fine. That's OK - you check it, it's fine, move on to the next.

Don't neglect the Error log

Yes, the Webmaster Tools reports are nice, but remember that Google doesn't see everything. Your web server does see every page attempt and will log the errors. These logs aren't necessarily fun to look through, but they may contain some important mistakes that Google doesn't know about at all.  See my "Analyzing web logs for better SEO, SERP and visitor satisfaction" article for more on that.

Well worth the effort

A bad link is useless to you and just annoys the people who may run across it. Sometimes they'll be smart enough to correct the problem themselves (you can often observe that in your logs) but sometimes they will not.  Wouldn't you absolutely hate it if you had a malformed link from a site with a big Page Rank? I've had that happen to me.

Help yourself to more visitors and better SERP by fixing these problems!

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