According to "The Parable of the Lost Sheep," if a man lost a sheep, he would leave the others to look for it. When he had found it he would be very glad and rejoice with his friends. In this way the lost sheep becomes temporarily more important than all the others.

As SEOs, don't we spend so much time trying to create that winning piece of content or obtaining the prized link?  Why not let your link profile evolve for a few days and retrieve some of those broken links caused by moved pages, deleted pages or new URLs?

Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors Report

Tap into the power of Webmaster Tools with the crawl error report, a simple list of 404 errors that Googlebot is getting when it visits your website. In a few viewings of this report, I found dozens of links to pages that don't exist.  Great, you're thinking.  Now what?

Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Error Reveal Lost Links

Create a 301 Redirect List in Google Docs

Google Docs is a simple way to share an active spreadsheet that more than one person will be working on at any given time. I've created a Google Spreadsheet called "301 Redirects" with two columns.  On the left is the FROM column where I copy/paste the pages resulting in 404s from the crawl error report. On the right is the TO column, where I paste the URL where I want the page to resolve to.

Mark the to-be-done URLs in red, so as not to mix them up with 301s you've already created.

Determining The Best Page For Your Redirect

A quick glance shows me that a particular page (http://www.voices.com/voice-mail-greeting.htm)  no longer exists.  In order to find the next best URL, I Google site:voices.com keyword.  While it may not be the best approach, it's a quick and dirty way to find out which page Google believes is the most relevant on my site for a given keyword.  In this case, it was a page about voice-overs for telephone systems.

Google site:yourdomain.com keyword to find the top page for a keyword

Share The Google Spreadsheet with Your Developer

If you're not comfortable editing the .htaccess file, don't.  Leave that for the professionals.  I use the "Share" feature in Google Docs to send the request to my developer.   It's pretty clear that the red rows are the ones to be worked on.

Update Your 301 Redirect Spreadsheet

Double check each and every URL to be sure it resolved correctly on the page you specified.  If your site is anything like ours, you're dealing with hundreds of pages, there is the potential for pages to get redirected to the wrong ones, or worse yet, redirected to another non-existent page. Once you've confirmed the link is all good, mark the URL as complete by changing the background color from red to green, and slide the row to the bottom of the list.  When you're all done, your spreadsheet should be nice and green, like this:

Completed 301 Redirect Spreadsheet

Wrap-Up

Just like the shepherds of days gone by, we should spend some time finding those lost links and rejoicing when we can bring them home.