Are You Losing Out On Links To Your Site?

This is a huge tip for webmasters out there who have not yet discovered the new 404 feature released in Google's Webmaster Tools.

Matt Cutts did an great review on the new 404 error page feature to outline the exact steps you can take to see if you are missing out on a slew of links from other sites that may be simply mis-typed or mal-formed.

I reviewed my 404 error stats and found I had close to 100 links pointing to various pages on my site that were not working due to case problems in the url, or other typo problems.

I was able to create a few redirect rules in my Apache httpd.conf to help point the broken links to the corresponding active pages on my site.  I used a 301 redirect rule so search engines would now start counting these links as legitimate, active links to my site.

After downloading the 404 error report from Google's Webmaster Tools I had fixed a majority of the broken inbound links within an hour.  

Probably my most productive hour I ever spent.  If you have not already explored this new feature, I would definitely recommend checking out Matt's blog and follow his steps to review your broken inbound links.