Recently I wrote about the significant improvements that Live Search Webmaster Center has gone through, which has really boosted the product. To put the new enhancements through their paces, it seemed like a good idea to compare what it was displaying versus what Google Webmaster Tools was showing.

Live Search Webmaster Center showed that I didn’t have anything wrong with my robots.txt file, nor was I suffering from long and complex dynamic URLs – however I did have a handful of 404 errors through the site. Live Webmaster Center had picked up that I had linked to another site without the http:// in the href attribute, like:

• <a href=”www.domain.com/important/article/”>important article</a>

which when clicked, was delivering a 404 error on my site with a URL like:

• http://ifdebug.com/article/my-article/www.domain.com/important/article/

To my surprise, when I explored that same information within Google Webmaster Tools – they had not picked up that I had linked that article incorrectly.

Moral of the story, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. While Google hadn’t picked it up or had just compensated for my mistake – simple mistakes like that may have an adverse effect on less capable search engines.

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