Recently, Google Webmaster Tools has introduced its Crawl Error feature which provides details about the site URLS which Google tried to crawl but could not access. Back then, the Crawl Error feature just gives the URLS contained in sitemaps and URLs found through Google’s regular web crawl. When reporting this errors, the Webmaster tools just indicated the errors and leave site administrators to track down the cause of those errors.
But that was before. Now, the Webmaster Tools has made this task easier. The site diagnostic part of the Webmaster Tools now includes a “Linked From” column aside from the “Not Found” and “Errors for URLs in Sitemaps” reports. The Linked From column list down the number of pages that link to a specific “Not Found” URL as well as the date when the error was discovered. These data can also be downloaded from the Webmaster Tools.
These new webmaster tools feature is definitely useful especially when trying to correct crawling errors on our respective sites. The more errors that sites generate would affect the sites’ performance on Search Engine results page. More importantly, these crawling errors may or may not be caused internally but rather externally. Since the new feature can identify specific URLs, webmasters can easily identify if the errors were caused by external links. If so, they can contact webmasters of those external sites to correct the errors.
