Google punishes sites heavily for 404 errors. By the time you realize your site has an error its usually too late and you’re already being punished for them. I suggest you stay proactive on your 404 errors and use a link checker. I found this extremely useful tool. Xenu’s Link Sleuth. It basically crawls your entire site for every single internal and external link. You can chose to ignore external links if you want as well and just focus on internal links. It even visits images and mailto and just about anything that has a ’src’ or ‘href’ in the html of your site. I considered it a nice toy when I first used it but when it quickly found numerous serious 404 issues on a few of my sites I upgraded the importance of this tool in my toolbox. This will keep you ahead of the curve instead of constantly playing catchup. Try it out on your site and I guarantee you’ll find 404s you had no idea existed. It shows you all the sites that have the bad links on them as well so you know where to go to correct the problem. Best of all this software is free! Its a Windows application unfortunately but any self respecting web developer has virtual machines with different operating systems on them, Windows being one of them, so that shouldn’t be much of a problem if you’re a serious developer.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 8:50 pm and is filed under Google, Reviews, SEO, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.