Is Webmaster Tools Useless as a broken Link Detector?
-
Buongiorno from yes we still have free parking Wetherby UK!
Ok when it comes to detecting broken links I'm getting really frustrated with webmaster tools. Now I'm probably going to end up with egg on my face with this one but here is an example of webmaster tools reporting a broken link which i cant find.http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/phantom-broken-links_zpsb74e1246.jpg
Having trawled through the code i just cant see the knackered link? Is it a phantom report or is something usefull being detected here?
Grazie tanto,
David -
Hi David,
Check the date when the broken link was detected in Google Webmaster Tools. The reports get updated late in GWT. To ensure that all the internal links ae working fine, use Xenu Link Sleuth. It is a freely available tool and is pretty good at detecting broken links.
Regards
-
I use a chrome extension and it is very reliable, called check my links. I checked the page with it and it didn't report any broken link.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Get anchor text, nofollow info etc from a list of links
Hi everybody. I'm currently doing a backlink audit for a client and I've hit a small problem. I'm combining data from Ahrefs, OSE, Webmaster Tools and Link Detox. I've got around 27k links in total now, but the issue is that WMT does not provide data on target page, anchor text and nofollow/dofollow. This means I have around 1k links with only partial information. Does anyone know of a way that I can get this data automatically? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Blink-SEO1 -
What are some good SERP visibility tools?
With keyword data from Google on its way out, we're losing our ability to discover what keywords a website is ranking for (you can do ranking checks, but only if you already know what keywords the site is ranking for). What are some good SERP visibility tools? (i.e. you enter the domain name, and the tool lists which keywords the site ranks for organically, etc.) I know SpyFu offers this, but they seem to be PPC focused and perhaps not very accurate. I know other companies offer it, but I'm blanking on which ones.
Reporting & Analytics | | AdamThompson0 -
Have You Ever Gotten False or Odd Notifications from Google Webmaster Tools?
I just got an email for one of my client websites from Google Webmaster Tools letting me know that the Google Bot could not access the website? The notification indicated that there may be a robots.txt issue that prevented crawling, but that they would try something to crawl it again. In this situation, we had just created a new Webmaster Tools account for the client, and there were (are) two GWT accounts now for the website, one that is incorrectly set to http://clientwebsite.com and the other that is set to www.clientwebsite.com. One of them reports zero errors, and the other reports an odd crawl error. Anyone encountered this type of thing before?
Reporting & Analytics | | williammarlow0 -
Is the link data from Open Site Explorer in real time or an average?
I just started using Open Site Explorer to track internal and external link data. Is this information given in real time or is it an average over a specified period of time?
Reporting & Analytics | | mequoda0 -
Links are not found in OSE or am I missing ?
Hi.. All of our targeted pages have gone through serious Blog Posting and Social Bookmarking. All the sites were more than PR1 or 2 and all of them had a dofollow link with the perfect anchor texts. But when I trying to check our pages on OSE, it doesnt any of them. Why is that ? Im getting worried now. We have spent our last 7 months on this .
Reporting & Analytics | | qubesys0 -
Too Many On-Page Links
I'm getting the warning of "Too many on-page links". I have a number of affiliate marketing sites, all Wordpress, all with sidebars. In the header navigation bar is a link that offers "reviews" and links to each product/brand. This is not a drop down link but leads to a page with product links. Also, in the sidebar I have links that also lead to the products/brands. Redundant yes, but in the beginning this seemed to be a good practice in site design. It would be easy to simply remove the widget that contains the link process in the sidebar. The problem may simply be that the sidebar is the same for every page in the site(s). Is this hurting total SEO as my sites are all over 95-percent indexed. One site in particular does very well in traffic and sales so is removing these links potentially going to improve my SEO and ultimately by success? Thanks, Don
Reporting & Analytics | | JavaManOne0 -
Why are Seemingly Randomly Generated URLs Appearing as Errors in Google Webmaster Tools?
I've been confused by some URLs that are showing up as errors in our GWT account. They seem to just be randomly generated alphanumeric strings that Google is reporting as 404 errors. The pages do 404 because nothing ever existed there or was linked to. Here are some examples that are just off of our root domain: /JEzjLs2wBR0D6wILPy0RCkM/WFRnUK9JrDyRoVCnR8= /MevaBpcKoXnbHJpoTI5P42QPmQpjEPBlYffwY8Mc5I= /YAKM15iU846X/ymikGEPsdq 26PUoIYSwfb8 FBh34= I haven't been able to track down these character strings in any internet index or anywhere in our source code so I have no idea why Google is reporting them. We've been pretty vigilant lately about duplicate content and thin content issues and my concern is that there are an unspecified number of urls like this that Google thinks exist but don't really. Has anyone else seen GWT reporting errors like this for their site? Does anyone have any clue why Google would report them as errors?
Reporting & Analytics | | kimwetter0 -
Will javascript generated links affect my bounce rate?
Hi all, I run a site called Applicable Jobs (http://www.applicablejobs.com) and from analyising my analytics I notice my bounce rate is unusually high at around 85%. I'm keen to get this right down as I've read recently that a high bounce rate is a metric Google uses in determining positioning in the SERPs. I honestly don't think it's the quality of my content because I feel it's genuinely useful to my target audience but I'm wondering if the way my jobs list is generated is causing an issue. At the moment I have my jobs listings generated through javascript so I can have nice effects and use a bit of ajax but if Google crawls it, it obviously won't be able to see the listings. So I'm wondering if when a user comes to the site and they click on one of the job listings, does the Google analytics code recognise that click because that link is generated through javascript? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Benji870