New and interesting features are being added to Google Webmaster Tools on a regular basis. Though Yahoo and MSN do update their tools and features, they lag far behind when it comes to Google’s update frequency. Google now helps webmasters understand the crawl error sources.
Webmasters using Google’s Webmaster Tools would have faced the issue of not knowing the exact cause of “Not Found” and “Errors for URLs in Sitemaps” errors. Google reports a “Not Found” error if the URL is present in another website, however, not available on the owners website.
Google has now added a new column “Linked From” which lists the number of pages that link to a “Not Found” URL. Once when you click on the “Linked From” link, a new dialog box appears which lists each individual page that has linked to the specific URL. The link page can be either within the website or in an external website.
Further more, you can also download either a specific table or all errors for the site or all sources of error in the site. This new feature will help webmasters reduce 404 errors by identifying the source of the issue which can help search engine rankings in a positive way.