404checker.com / crawl errors

[Alex-Harford]

I noticed a few strange crawl errors in a Google Webmaster Tools account - further investigation showed they're pages that don't exist linked from here: http://404checker.com/404-checker-log

Basically that means anyone can enter a URL into the website and it'll get linked from that page, temporarily at least. As there are hundreds of links of varying quality - at the moment they range from a well known car manufacturer to a university, porn and various organ enlargement websites - could that have a detrimental effect on any websites linked? They are all nofollow.

Why would they choose to list these URLs on their website? It has some useful tools and information but I don't see the point in the log page. I have used it myself to check HTTP statuses but may look elsewhere from now on.

[RyanKent]

As SEOs we pay close attention to our backlinks. We run various reports and desire "clean" link reports. Most SEOs, myself included, obsess a bit too much over this data.

To the best of our knowledge, bad links pointed to our site have absolutely no negative impact to our site. If there was any damage, there would be tons of "link attacks" where 10 page e-commerce sites selling acai berry and other products would be linked to from various sites with bad (404) links.

As to why this particular site shares these links, I can take a guess they want to show potential users what the results look like. The only way to truly find out is to use the site's contact form and ask

[Alex-Harford]

True...I must admit I don't like seeing 404 links in my reports that are potentially beyond my control. I also wondered if it breaks some sort of privacy law - there's no privacy policy I can see on the website - perhaps there should be a warning to users of the tool. I must admit it's interesting (for at least a few seconds) to spy on who has seemingly used the tool.

I'll send them an e-mail and update this post with any response.