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Oct 13, 2008 at 5:28pm Eastern by Vanessa Fox Google Webmaster Tools Now Provide Source Data For Broken Links Ever since Google Webmaster Tools started reporting on broken links to a site, webmasters have been asking for the sources of those links. Today, Google has delivered. From Webmaster Tools you can now see the page that each broken link is coming from. This information should be of great help for webmasters in ensuring the visitors find their sites and that their links are properly credited. The value of the 404 error report Why does Google report broken links in the first place? As Googlebot crawls the web, it stores a list of all the links it finds. It then uses that list for a couple of things: * As the source list to crawl more pages on the web * To help calculate PageRank If your site has a page with the URL www.example.com/mypage.html and someone links to it using the URL www.example.com/mpage.html, then a few things can happen: * Visitors who click on that link arrive at the 404 page for your site and aren't able to get to the content they were looking for * Googlebot follows that link and instead of finding a valid page of your site to crawl, receives a 404 page * Google can't use that link to give a specific page on your site link credit (because it has no page to credit) Clearly, knowing about broken links to your site is valuable. The best solution in these situations generally is to implement a 301 redirect from the incorrect URL to the one. If you see a 404 error for www.example.com/mpage.html, then you can be pretty sure they meant to link to www.example.com/mypage.html. By implementing the redirect, visitors who click the link find the right content, Googlebot finds the content, and mypage.html gets credit for the link. In addition, you can scan your site to see if any of the broken links are internal, and fix them. But finding broken links on your site can be tedious (although it's valuable to run a broken l

Oct 22, 2008 at 10:55am Eastern by Paul Bruemmer Two Ways To Justify SEO In Uncertain Times In House - A Column From Search Engine Land During uncertain economic times like these, our advice is to always stick with the fundamentals to maintain business efficiency and progress. No matter what your business model, performing the fundamentals will keep you on-track and in-line for leveraging future success. If the C-level executives in your company are having any doubts about the value of SEO and are hesitating to release more funding, it's time to perform a cost-benefit exercise. It's your job as an in-house SEO manager to reestablish their confidence in the value of SEO as well as your value and the value of your team. When funding gets in the way, having a narrow focus, putting it on the table, and describing company goals you are committed to are all very important. 1) Leverage Your Paid Search Data To demonstrate implicit value for SEO, start with a baseline. Show where your key terms currently rank in organic and multiply by the cost-per-click value. Run the numbers for the value of direct clicks with high search intent. One way to go about this is to calculate an Effective Cost-Per-Click (eCPC) for your organic listings: 1. Access the Keyword Tool within your Google AdWords account. 2. Type your best performing (for instance, 20) keywords. 3. Select descriptive words or phrases and synonyms. 4. Click Get Keyword Ideas. This will produce a report; select Exact within the "Match Type" field and click on Approx Avg Search Volume. 1. Look at the Cost-Per-Click column to acquire the CPC value (let's assume it's $2.00). 2. Go to your web analytics data and identify the number of organic clicks for these keywords (let's assume 20,000/month). 3. Multiply the two (CPC times the number of organic clicks (in this case $40,000/mo)). 4. Create a spreadsheet with your best performing keywords and make the statement, "if we

Competitor with good site, pricing on site, lots of information.