SEO Tip in Google Analytics - Spotting Broken Inbound Links

Much of the challenge in SEO (search engine optimization) lies in link prospecting and maintenance - that is, tracking down high ranking, relevant, and/or authoritative sites and encouraging them to link to your site. This in itself is no easy feat - and nothing is more frustrating than discovering that great link from AwesomeSiteThatRules.com is now pointing to a broken or now-nonexistent page on your website.

Link monitoring is a time-consuming and fairly tedious process, but there IS an easier way to find referring sites that are linking to inaccurate URLs. If you use Google Analytics on your site, here's a quick snippet of code you can add to your 404 page to capture those sites.

Every page on your site should have the default, standard tracking code installed. To view this within Google Analytics, find the profile for the site in question and click "EDIT" from the account overview screen, then "Check Status". It should look something like this (click to enlarge):

That circled bit of "X"s will actually be your unique GA account number. Now to see what sites have broken links pointing to your website, you'll want to add the following segment of code to the standard tracking code on only your 404 page. In the call to trackPageview, you'll add ...

"/404.html?page=" + document.location.pathname +

document.location.search + "&from=" + document.referrer

And you should end up with (click picture to enlarge):

Once this is set up, you should be able to track your 404 page from GA's "Content" reports, including referring sites. Now it's up to you - start bugging those people to update their links!