Back in 2008, Google's Matt Cutts revealed on his Blog, how webmasters can easily find back links to their websites that they may have not even known existed. The technique is freely available to anyone. It is open for anyone using their Google WebMaster tools. Right within Google’s dashboard, there is a field for web crawl errors.
If any IBLs (InBound Links) are coming to your site but not finding a page, they will give a 404 error (Page not found). If there is anyone linking to any of your 404 pages, you can easily drill down in to the data and find the URL and the path of the site that is linking to you.
Then you have two options:
- Contact the owner of the site, and ask them if they mind linking to your “new” page. Just don’t forget to thank them for linking in the first place.
- Setup a 301 redirect on your site from the old link to a relevant page on your site.
Now if you are using Drupal to manage your website content, this makes it even easier as you can go through the reports and find the 404 pages and then very easily setup URL redirects. All of this can be done directly through the Drupal admin. You will not necessarily get the information of the linking website, but you will be able to see the pages that traffic is landing on and then correctly redirect those visitors to the proper pages.
In the Drupal admin just go to Reports>Top 'Page Not Found' Errors and then look for the pages. The go into Site Building>URL redirects and redirect your pages.
Another great reason to use Drupal to build your SEO friendly website.
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