Have you made use of the new Google webmaster tools crawl error features?

[MichaelCorfman]

On March 12th Google announced it had made significant improvements to the crawl error report and interface provided by Google webmaster tools for a site. You can see the complete announcement made in the official Google webmaster central blog here: Crawl Errors: The Next Generation.

The big improvement from my perspective is new new interface provided for errors that are reported. If you click on the url that the Google spider had a problem with, you can find out what pages linked to the problem url. And, if you fix the issue with the url, you fetch the url as Googlebot and can mark the issue as fixed. That removes the url from the list of urls reported with errors, and let's Google know you view the issue has been handled.

Personally, I've made heavy use of the Next Generation crawl error functions, and been very pleased with the new functionality. So, thought it made sense to spread the word, and also to find out what others think of the new features.

Michael

[TravG]

Interesting I will have to check this out. I like the fact you can mark it as fixed.

[baldidiot]

Interesting I will have to check this out. I like the fact you can mark it as fixed.

Ditto!

I had no idea they're done this, but it definitely sounds interesting!

[ocreditor]

I haven't used them much yet at all, thanks for raising awareness Michael

[DanHorvat]

I'm using it ever since it was released, it's great.

[lowrisk]

I always use the health tab on webmaster tools, and always check for errors. If there's any 404 errors, then I redirect them a correct or relevant page. Then simply mark them as a fixed. I suspect Google prefers that to a load of unreachable pages. Also, I ensure I do this if and when I removed old content as well.

[universal4]

I actually don't like one or two of the changes and think a few things worked better before they started moving stuff around the past month or so.

Rick
Universal4