A quick way to increase traffic to your blog
Matt Cutts posted a great tip yesterday on his blog. He explained how Webmaster Tools now shows you the source of all your crawl errors. This is very useful as it not only shows you what pages are generating 404 errors, it also shows you what pages are linking to those incorrect urls as well.
How to find the source of your crawl errors
The first thing you need to do is login to Webmaster Tools. If you haven’t used this service before you will need to sign up and add your blog and let Google crawl your site for the errors etc but for the rest of this post I will assume that you have used it before and your blog has been verified 
Once logged in click on your blog to see the overview for it. It should look something like this :
As you can see from the above image, there are 3 sections with the warning symbol 
next to it.
- Not found : This shows you the pages which have generated 404 errors.
- URLs restricted by robots.txt : This is a list of pages blocked by my robots.txt
- Unreachable URLs : 2 pages were unreachable on BloggingTips. I have checked these pages and they are live so my site was have been down briefly when the Google spider arrived.
file. Most of these are private directories in wordpress and URL’s which WordPress generates which causes duplicate content (eg. the original url’s before permalinks was used and trackback urls etc).
The ‘Not Found’ section is the one you should access to see what pages are generating 404 errors. Once you access it you should see something like this :
The left hand side shows you the URL’s which are causing the 404 errors. Sometimes the 404 is generated because someone has wrote an incorrect URL on their blog whereas other times it’s because a page has been removed and there are still links to it. Also common is incorrect links within your blog. For example, if you link to www.anothersite.com on your blog instead of http://www.anothersite.com the link will show as something like www.yourblog.com/2008/10/14/myblogpost/www.anothersite.com/, which doesn’t exist.
To the right hand side of the 404 Error pages is the ‘Linked From’ column. This shows you exactly who is linking to these incorrect URL’s, all you need to do is click on the pages link. This will bring up a pop up box like this :
So how do you increase traffic to your blog using this service. Well generally speaking I wouldn’t bother informing other webmasters that they have linked to an incorrect URL on your blog unless they are clearly sending you a lot of traffic. A 404 error page should be sufficient for those errors.
However you can do something about the other causes of a 404. You can correct links which are incorrect within your blog so that you don’t lose any visitors. If you have removed pages from your site you can setup a 301 or 302 redirect so that google either goes to the new URL or is sent to the home page.
I recommend checking your blogs ‘Not Found’ errors through Webmaster Tools. I like to think that I’m proactive with this kind of thing but even I was surprised by the number of 404 errors that were being generated on BloggingTips.
If you are unsure about any of this please leave a comment and I’ll do my best to help
Links mentioned in this post :
Written by Kevin Muldoon from Blog Themes ClubPosted on October 14th, 2008 and filed under Search Engine Optimisation
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11 Responses to “A quick way to increase traffic to your blog”
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I see 404 errors all the time, although I’ve never had them happen on my sites, to my knowledge. I’m so glad you posted on this because, should I get a 404 or crawl error, I know what to do! Thanks for posting!
I rely pretty heavily on this for some of my sites.
One of my sites (not a blog, http://www.silvertails.net) went through a transition from e107 to Joomla at the start of the year, and is likley not to be moved over to Wordpress by January of 2009. During the move, obviously a lot of links became broken, I didn’t do anything about it figuring my members would sort it out as everything was pretty obvious if you went to the main domain.
This was a huge mistake, my PR dropped down the list, from 4 to 2 and now finally it sits on 1. When I noticed it drop to one, I looked into it more and realised just how many 404 errors I had, from avatar images in the forums, to gallery items and much much more. So I spent about 1 week trawling through all the 404 errors in webmaster tools and in my cpanel error log. And eventually cleared out everything I could find, changing them to 301 redirects, I now check it monthly and clear things out. My PR didn’t improve but my search engine ranking quickly jumped up the list to somewhere around the top 6 results for my target keywords, which was my aim…..now to pick up PR
I’m wondering if there is an easier way to setup 301 redirects? Has anyone used the WP plugins below?
Permalink Redirect: http://yoast.com/wordpress/permalink-redirect
Redirection: http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection
Objection Redirection: http://www.biggnuts.com/objection-redirection-WordPress-plugin
Do you know which one would be more appropriate to use for 301 and 404 errors?
I am also considering changing the structure of my site from a date/permalink to category/subcategory/permalink structure. Can you recommend any plugin to use for this and any other advice on how to do this, as well as any side effects that may result (i.e. drop in SEO, PageRank, etc…)?
Thanks for your time and help, it is greatly appreciated!
Good article. Thank you. I ll try.
I will check this right now, i’m curious how much traffic it’s wasted this way…. thanks for tip.
Good tip to recover some traffic. There is one more option in Google Webmaster Tools, than can bring more traffic. In ‘Tools’ Option is ‘Enhanced Image Search’. Activating this option includes all the images hosted on your blog for Google enhanced image search. To get full advantage of this option, make sure you properly tag them and include a descriptive alt attribute associated with the img tag.
Dan – Glad you got it sorted. Unfortunately, when you change from one script to another you inevitably change the url structure of all the content so you need to deal with this kind of thing.
Kevin – I’ve always kept the same permalink structure for all my blogs so I’ve never had to use one of those plugins before. For a 404 error all you need to do is setup a standard 404 page which tells visitors that they have come to an incorrect url and point them to your navigation bar or sitemap.
I did do a lot of 301 redirects on one of my sites last month though I did this manually by redirecting each page with a 301 (You can see what I did here.
Rajeev – nice tip. I’ll have to look into that
I’ve used the Permalink Redirect plugin when I switched a blog from original URLs to permalinks, however when I upgraded the site to 2.6 the permalinks died and I had to remove the plugin, I guess it wasn’t 2.6 compatible, or at least not on IIS.
Kevin – nice post. I’ve not looked in Webmaster Tools for a while but I think I’ll spend a day running through all my sites and checking on the 404s now. I usually just use AWStats and see which 404s are popping up and sort out the redirects on them. It’ll be handy to know which pages are linking incorrectly too so that I can fix those. Especially as I’ve just merged two blogs into one, although I’m hoping my 301s will deal with most of the 404s.
I dont understand the role that Matt Cutts plays at google. It seems odd that he gives seo tips.
Why should it be odd? Besides the fact that most of the information that Matt gives out is there to help user experience. In this instance, all he’s doing is informing everyone of a new additional to the Webmaster tools.