Checking For Broken Links
Search engines and visitors find pages through links.
Because the web is constantly changing and sites/pages are being moved and removed it is inevitable that over time your site will contain broken links either inbound to your site of external to your site.
It is important that you periodically check your site for broken links and correct them.
Until recently the only possibility was to use external tools. The one I used was the free Xenu link sleuth and I still recommend that you download it try it as it also does sitemaps.
However if you are using Google Webmaster Tools there is an easier way. One of the reports show crawl errors and you can find out how many page not founds (404 error pages) you have, and more importantly you can find out what pages are linking to the missing page.
Here is the site overview showing that I have one page not found error
If you click on details it show the page(s) that are causing the error, this is extremely important if you want to fix it (which you do):
You can see above that two pages are linking to it it if you click this link it shows the address of those pages.
Above are the pages linking to the missing page. One is internal to the site, and so it can be corrected, the other is an external link you can fix it with a 301 redirect in the htaccess file.
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