Here are the types of link errors that are characteristically listed in your Google Webmaster account (e.g. http://www.google.com/webmaster):

1. Pages you formerly had on your site which no longer exist
2. Pages you formerly had which have been renamed (but the old page names may exist on other sites)
3. Links (from other sites) to pages on your site which never existed but the links are incorrect or have typos

Let's review the above in more detail. Google reports errors in two ways for the most part. Either there are URLs (ie. web site addresses) that once existed on your site and no longer exist. OR there are links on other websites that point to URLs on your site that don't exist. And in this second case, those other websites might simply have mistakes in their links. To be clear when I talk about URLs, I just mean web pages which could include blog posts, articles, web pages, even links to image files and any other page that gets a unique web address.

So in some cases when you are reviewing report errors don't start thinking your webmaster or site operator or search marketing firm screwed up. It's not necessarily about you making any mistake (and by you I mean whoever is publishing to your website on your behalf). Google just reports on ALL errors which includes errors inside your site and errors on other people's websites linking to your site.

Now if you have hired a search marketing firm to monitor your webmaster account for reported errors of course the first question you will have is who is going to fix them because the likelihood is that you will not want to on your own simply because its just a mundane task that can be outsourced or handled by your webmaster. You should look through your search marketing agreement to see what the terms and conditions are regarding both monitoring and then fixing reported errors. Consider that Google can just as easily report 10 errors as 1,000 errors. so usually you will find that the fixing of errors is not covered by a search marketng agreement simply because it's impossible to predict how much time might have to be spent monthly to fix errors. What you may find is a limit clause that covers up to x amount of links each month since that is more predictable.

Now in terms of fixing the reported errors there are usually two types of situations you would encounter: there is the company who has an internal IT staff and they login to their website and make what is called 301 redirects usually to let Google know that the page it is pointing to now should point to a different page that actually exists (or you can let Google know that the error page no longer exists and they should remove it from its index).

The other type of company is the one with no IT staff and their hosting company OR their web services company is informed about the errors and they make the fixes as per your services contract with them. As described above, it's not a standard practice for search marketing firms to just fix all errors because often companies are on different technology platforms and they can't learn them all. And secondly, making fixes like this on the website would force your search agency to assume responsibility for the website which is something many prefer not to do especially since the process is pretty standard for the web services company or IT staff to handle as part of their monthly responsibilities.

Another reason the search engine optimization firm would not fix errors is simply numerical. What would expect to happen if suddenly Google reports 1,000 errors or something we experienced recently where Google reported 177,000 errors. I don't think you would anticipate that your standard search engine optimization contract would include fixing that number of errors with no extra fee as part of your monthly campaign when its not possible to assess each month in advance the resource allocation to deal with it.

So what you should look for in your search engine optimization agreement is to ensure that your agency is monitoring your Webmaster account. Make sure they send you a report by email so that you have awareness of what’s happening with your website. You really want to have transparency with your firm and make sure they keep you in the loop. Then if you have your service provider making the fixes we recommend that you negotiate the fee so that if they clean errors they caused then the fixes should be free.So if the errors are something due to their work effort they should not bill you for it. but if it is something unrelated to their work then you should expect to pay for the time taken to fix them. If there is a bill and it's a small number of errors it should be a deminimus amount by the way bec let's say there's 10 errors then the bill should be for sure under an hour.

Hope this helps you understand your Google Webmaster errors. Be empowered.

Thanks for reading. Jason.
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