Discovering broken links to my site
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How do I find out if other websites are trying to link to my website using a misspelled URL or broken link?
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One extra resource is this article
http://moz.com/blog/set-it-and-forget-it-seo-chasing-the-elusive-passive-seo-dream
It gives a little more info in researching broken links from other sites, and even gives a great explanation of using the levenshtein distance to automatically correct incoming broken links on the fly.
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:))
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Beat me to the punch as I was writing up my response. Thumbs up to you for a good answer that was similar to mine.
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Depends on the way in which they misspelled things. If they got your domain name correct but messed something up after the slash (i.e. mysite.com/TyposHappne) then you will likely see a notice in Google Webmaster Tools of a 404'd page. At which point you could either ask the webmaster at the other site to fix the link or you could 301 the 404's page to the correct URL. If the incorrect link spells your domain name wrong... well then there's really no easy way to find it. You could potentially run a crawl test on a website that you know does link to you on other pages to see if the test brings up notices of broken links and then check if those broken links were meant for your site. Beyond that I don't believe you can do anything except hope the site administrator or their SEO runs their own tests to check for broken links and then fixes them accordingly.
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One of the best way to check links that comes to your site is to use backlink checker software (open site explorer). If the main url is mis-spelt i don't think you can find out using the software as the url wouldn't point to your website at all. If you requested the link your self from a website, you can only find out by visiting the website and checking the link.
To check the broken links, I use broken link checker software and i do redirect or fix the links so if there are any links coming through to those pages it'll be fixed or redirected. I use brokenlinkcheck.com or screaming frog to check broken links.
I hope that helps.
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