• Search Engine Land , Tuesday, October 14, 2008 3:15 PM

Google has delivered on the promise to tell Webmasters the pages where broken links originate. Knowing about them will help ensure visitors find their site and that fixed links are properly credited.

By implementing the redirect, visitors who search and click on the link can find the correct content. Actually, Googlebot finds the content, and mypage.html gets credit for the link. Vanessa Fox says that when you see a 404 error for www.example.com/mpage.html, most likely users meant to link to www.example.com/mypage.html. The broken link is missing the "y" in mypage.html.

Fox provides information on how to view broken links on your pages, as well as the source URL. Microsoft Live Search also recently added 404 reporting in its Webmaster tools, though the company doesn't provide source URL data, yet.

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