Google Adds Source Links

Google recently added source page info to its Webmaster Tools reports. Previously, when Google reported 404 errors while crawling your site, you had no idea where to look: it could have come from an error in your own pages or someone else's, but Google didn't say. Now they do.

I've been asking for this for a long time because Google regularly reported many errors for my site. They'd typically be malformed links, and especially there were many links that Google reported which would have trailing characters like %3Cbr (which is a "<br" of course). I searched and searched trying to find where I was introducing these characters, but could not.

When Google added this new feature, I of course looked even closer because now I knew specifically where the errors originated. It turns out that it's Google's fault, not mine. See the section below where it says "Comments /Web/google-adds-source-links.html" ? Originally those had a "<br>" immediately following and apparently the Google spider would sometimes misinterpret that as a link (it should not). I changed the code to make sure a space appears before the "<br>"; I expect that will fix it. If not, I'll turn them into real links or try suppressing the leading slash - something will stop it, I'm sure.

The source information did help me quickly find pages where I had malformed links also. I am very happy that Google finally has added this.