Matt Cutts is Google's search-quality evangelist, head of Google's Webspam team -- and something of a rock star to SEO geeks the world over.

That's because he's one of the few voices straight from the heart of Google that is accessible, willing and able to talk to SEOers. Matt shares his perspective on what an honest website owner or SEO can do to benefit his rankings AND provide a better search experience: the classic win-win scenario that is at the heart of the company's search algorithm. It's all about great content, clearly described, and attracting lots of high-quality, unpaid links from the web at large.

Neither is Matt shy about slamming black-hat SEOers for their attempts to game the system, especially by buying paid links. He helped roll out Google's Paid Link Report in June 2007 -- a policy that drew the ire of some webmasters who felt that Google hadn't defined what exactly a "paid link" is. For instance, without guaranteeing inclusion, the Yahoo! Directory charges a fee for editorial consideration. If you appear in the Yahoo Directory, have you bought a paid link?

But I digress. Matt published a blog post today entitled Free Links to Your Site. The title is a little sensational, but SEOers will appreciate the excitement. Basically, there's a new feature in your Google's Webmaster Tools account that lets you see all the incorrect links hitting your site. These links, to obsolete or nonexistent pages, result in 404 errors, or "page not found" errors.

So how does that translate into free links?

Well, as Matt points out, since Webmaster Tools reports the originating web-page for each of those bad links, it's fairly simple to contact each site owner and ask them to change a bad link to a correct, updated one. Voila, new "link juice" for the relevant pages on your site.

Are you averse to trying to dig up contact info and reaching a bunch of strangers to talk about links? If you have control over the redirection behavior of your web server, you can set up 301 redirects (aka "permanently moved") from each of the offending URLs pointing to the correct new page.