Ah, behold the power of Twitter. I’ve preached about the business benefits of using Twitter and shared examples of other Tweeple who have had problems solved when the company with which they were having issues with saw their gripe-filled Tweets and contacted them to fix things. Well, now I am one of those stories.

Last Wednesday, I wrote a blog post called My Beef with Google’s Web Master Tools detailing my frustration with their recently introduced “Link From” feature that allows you to see which external URLs are linking to non-existent URLs on your domain. The only problem, most of the time the tool didn’t work. I would get an “Our servers are busy. Try again later.”

After a couple of weeks of getting this message, I was fed up and blogged about it. I’d actually posted a couple of Tweets about it, too, but never got a response. But, my blog automatically posts to my Twitter account and later that same day, I got a Tweet from Sagar Kamdar (@skamdar) that read:

@garycope we are looking at the issue with the “Linked From” functionality. will get back to you when it is resolved.

I was floored! I could only assume that Sagar worked for Google. The next day, I got an e-mail alerting me that someone left a comment on my blog post. It was Sagar. He wrote:

The issue has been resolved. (link)

I checked the Webmasters Tools again and all but one “Linked From” function was working. I wrote back:

@skamdar Thanks! All but one of the “Linked From” links are working now for me. The first one on my list still returns “server busy” msg.

Sagar replied.

@garycope we’ll take a look.

@garycope we are unable to reproduce the issue internally. could you tell me the site and link that is ending in error.

This morning, I logged into Google’s Webmaster Tools and the link was working just fine. As a matter of fact, all of the links were working. I Tweeted back to @skamdar:

@skamdar The issue appears to be resolved. I logged into my Webmaster Tools today and did not receive any errors. Great job! Thanks!

I also told him via a comment on my blog that I would write a follow-up blog post (kinda like this one) singing the praises of Google’s development team. So, thanks Sagar and the rest of the Google Webmaster Tools team for using Twitter and actually taking the time to ready my blog and address the issue. It has been a tremendous help!

All Hail Google! OK, well, let’s not get carried away. Take care everyone!

As a Web designer, Webmaster and inhouse SEO/SEM, I was THRILLED when Google announced that its Webmaster Tools had added a “Linked From” feature. This new feature finally allowed Web site owners to find out which URLs were linking to “not found” pages on their site.

For example, let’s say you did a redesign and int he process, renamed some of your URLs. If another Web site was linking to your old URL and you move it or rename it, the link from that other site is now broken and you’re not getting credit for that link because the search engines aren’t finding anything when they follow that link. Booo!

How do we fix this? Well, for starters, I would suggest keeping the old URLs and creating a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. This preserves any ‘link juice” your older URL had acquired and transfers it to the new one. It also prevents “Not Found” links from appearing in your Google Webmaster Tools > Diagnostics > Web Crawl > Not Found list because anyone still linking to the outdated URL will automatically be directed to the new one and you don’t have to do a thing.

The “Linked From” function was going to make my life, and the lives of many SEO/SEMs, much easier because it could save us the time of trying to find out who was linking to our “Not Found” URLs. Alas, you can imagine my supreme disappointment when I logged in to use the new feature and 95 percent of the time I get is this error message.

This kind of tool is invaluable to SEOs, especially inhouse SEOs, who are trying to make the most of their limited time and budgets. By identifying sites that have outdated links to our site, we can contact their Webmaster and provide the updated link, thus increasing our link juice. Of course, IF Google’s Webmaster Tools’ “Linked From” feature worked, it’d be even better.