Broken Links from Open Site Explorer
-
I am trying to find broken internal links within my site. I found a page that was non-existent but had a bunch of internal links pointing to that page, so I ran an Open Site Explorer report for that URL, but it's limited to 25 URLs.
Is there a way to get a report of all of my internal pages that link to this invalid URL? I tried using the link: search modifier in Google, but that shows no responses.
-
Whew! Big thread.
Sometimes, when you can't find all the broken links to a page, it's easier simply to 301 redirect the page to a destination of your choice. This helps preserve link equity, even for those broken links you can't find on large sites. (and external links, as well)
Not sure if this would help in your situation, but I hope you're getting things sorted out!
-
Jesse,
That's where I started my search, but GWMT wasn't showing this link. I can only presume that because it isn't coming back a 404 (it is showing that "We're Sorry" message instead) that they're considering that message to be content.
Thanks!
-
Lynn, that was a BIG help. I had been running that report, but was restricted to 25 responses. When I saw your suggestion to filter for only internal links, I was able to see all 127.
Big props. Thanks!
-
One more thing to add - GWMT should report all 404 links and their location/referrer.
-
oops! i did not know this. Thanks Irving.
-
Use the word FREE with an asterisk because sreaming frog is now limiting the free version to 500 pages. Xenu is better, even brokenlinkcheck.com lets you spider 3000 pages.
500 pages makes the tool practically worthless for any site of decent size.
-
Indeed if it is not showing a 404, that makes things a bit difficult!
You could try another way, use OSE!
Use the exact page, filter for only internal links, boom 127 pages that link to it. There might be more, but this should get you going!
-
Jesse:
I appreciate your feedback, but am surprised that the ScreamingFrog report found no 404s. SEOmoz found 15 in Roger's last crawl, but those aren't the ones that I'm currently trying to solve.
The problem page is actually showing up as duplicate content, which is kinda screwy. When visiting the page, our normal 404 error doesn't appear (which our developers are still trying to figure out), but instead, an error message appears:
http://www.gallerydirect.com/about-us/media-birchwood
If this were a normal 404 page, we'd probably be able to find the links faster.
-
I got tired of the confusion and went ahead and proved it. Not sure if this is the site you wanted results for, but I used the site linked in your profile (www.gallerydirect.com)
took me about 90 seconds and I had a full list... no 404s though
anyway here's a screenshot to prove it:
http://gyazo.com/67b5763e30722a334f3970643798ca62.png
so what's the problem? want me to crawl the fbi site next?
-
I understand. Thing is, there is a way and the spider doesn't affect anything. Like I said, I have screaming frog installed on my computer and I could run a report for your website right now and you or your IT department would never know it happened.. I just don't understand the part where the software doesn't work for you but to each their own i suppose.
-
Jesse:
That movie was creepy, but John Goodman was awesome in it.
I started this thread because I was frustrated that OSE restricts my results to 25 links, and I simply wanted to find the rest for that particular URL. I was assuming that there was either:
a. A method for getting the rest of the links that Roger found
b. Another way of pulling these reports from someone who already spiders them (since I can't get any using the link:[URL] in Google and Webmaster Tools isn't showing them).
Thanks to all for your suggestions.
-
run the spider based app from outside their "precious network" then. hell, i could run it right now for you from my computer at work if I wanted. Use your laptop or home computer. It's a simple spider you don't have to be within any network to run it. You could run one for CNN.com if you'd like as well...
-
How else do you expect to trace these broken links without using a "spider?"
Obviously it's the solution. And the programs take up all of like 8 megs... so what's the problem/concern?
I second the screaming frog solution. It will tell you exactly what you need to know and has ZERO risk involved (or whatever it is that's hanging you up). The bazooka comparison is ridiculous, because a bazooka destroys your house. Do you really think a spider crawl will affect your website?
Spiders crawl your site and report findings. This happens often whether you download a simple piece of software or not. What do you think OSE is? Or Google?
I guess what we're saying is if you don't like the answer, then so be it. But that's the answer.
PS - OSE uses a spider to crawl your site...
PPS - Do you suffer from arachnophobia? That movie was friggin awesome now I want to watch old Jeff Daniels films.
PPSS - Do you guys remember John Goodman being in that movie? Wow the late 80s early 90s were really somethin' special.
-
John, I certainly see your point, but our IT guys would not take too kindly to me running a spider-based app from inside their precious network, which is why I was looking for a less intrusive solution.
I'm planning on a campaign to revive "flummoxed" to the everyday lexicon next.
-
Hi Darin,
Both these softwares are made for exactly this kind of job and they are not huge system killing programs or anything. Seriously I use one or both almost every day. I suggest downloading them and seeing how you go, I think you will be happy enough with the results.
-
The way I see it, its much like you missing the last flight home, and you have a choice of getting the bus, that means you might take a little longer, or of course you can wait for the next flight ,which happens to be tomorrow evening, the bus will get you home that night.
I get the bus each and every time, I get home, later than expected I grant you, but I get home a lot quicker than waiting for the plane tomorrow.
Bewildered, I didn't realise it had fallen out of the diction, its a common word (I think) in Ireland, oh and I am still young (ish)
-
John:
Bewildered. There's a good word that I'm happy to see someone is keeping it alive for the younger generations.
I'm not ungrateful for your suggestions, but both involve downloading and installing a spider, which seems like overkill, much like using a bazooka to kill a housefly.
-
I am bewildered by this, I have told you one, Lynn has told you another piece of free software that will do this for you.
Anyway, good luck with however you resolve our issues
-
Lynn, part of the problem is definitely template-based, and one of our developers is working on that fix now. However, I also found a number of non-template created links to this page simply due to UBD error (an old Cobol programming term meaning User Brain Dead).
I need to find all of the non-template based, UBD links that may have been created and fix them.
-
Xenu will also do a similar job and doesn't have a limit which I recall the free version of screaming frog has: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
If you have loads of links to this missing page it sounds like you maybe have a template problem with the links getting inserted on every or lots of pages. In that case if you find the point in the template you will have fixed them all at once (if indeed it is like this).
-
Darin
Its a stand alone piece of software you run, it crawls your website and finds out broken inbound, outbound or internal links, tells you them ,you go and fix them
Enter your URL, be it a page or directory, run it, it will give you all bad links. And it wont limit you to 25.
You don't need to implement anything ... run the software once, use it, and well bin it afterwards if you wish
But by all means, you can do as you suggest with SE ...
Regards
John
-
John,
While I could look at implementing such a spider to run the check sitewide on a regular basis, I am not looking to go that far at the moment. For right now, I'm only looking for all of the pages on my site that link to a single incorrect URL. I would have to think that there's a solution available for such a limited search.
If I have to, I suppose I can fix the 25 that Open Site Explorer displays, wait a few days for the crawler to run again, then run the report again, fix the next 25, then so on and so on, but that's going to spread the fix out potentially over a number of weeks.
-
Free tool, non SEO Moz related
http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ , run that, will find all broken links, where they are coming from etc etc
Hope I aint braking any rules posting it
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does redirecting a duplicate page NOT in Google‘s index pass link juice? (External links not showing in search console)
Hello! We have a powerful page that has been selected by Google as a duplicate page of another page on the site. The duplicate is not indexed by Google, and the referring domains pointing towards that page aren’t recognized by Google in the search console (when looking at the links report). My question is - if we 301 redirect the duplicate page towards the one that Google has selected as canonical, will the link juice be passed to the new page? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lewald10 -
Tumblr links
I have several Tumblr blogs. Created when Tumblr links were worth more, and now primarily for my amusement. But, I'd like to get whatever link juice I can out of them. I thought only the footer links were do follow, but when I check Moz it's showing all links as do follow. Any idea which is true?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | julie-getonthemap1 -
Moving from a static HTML CSS site with .html files to a Wordpress Site while keeping link structure
Mozzers, Hope this finds you well. I need some advice. We have a site built with a dreamweaver template, and it is lacking in responsiveness, ease of updates, and a lot of the coding is behind traditional web standards (which I know will start to hurt our rank - if not the user experience). For SEO purposes, we would like to move the existing static based site to Wordpress so we can update it easily and keep content fresh. Our current site, thriveboston.com, has a lot of page extensions ending in .html. For the transition, it is extremely important for us to keep the link structure. We rank well in the SERPs for Boston Counseling, etc... I found and tested a plugin (offline) that can add a .html extension to Wordpress pages, which allows us to keep our current structure, but has anyone had any luck with this live? Has anyone had any luck moving from a static site - to a Wordpress site - while keeping the current link structure - without hurting any rank? We hope to move soon because if the site continues to grow, it will become even harder to migrate the site over. Also, does anyone have any hesitations? It this a bad move? Should we just stay on the current DWT template (the HTML and CSS) and not migrate? Any suggestions and advice will be heeded. Thanks Mozzers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _Thriveworks0 -
Site wide footer links vs. single link for websites we design
I’ve been running a web design business for the past 5 years, 90% or more of the websites we build have a “web design by” link in the footer which links back to us using just our brand name or the full “web design by brand name” anchor text. I’m fully aware that site-wide footer links arent doing me much good in terms of SEO, but what Im curious to know is could they be hurting me? More specifically I’m wondering if I should do anything about the existing links or change my ways for all new projects, currently we’re still rolling them out with the site-wide footer links. I know that all other things being equal (1 link from 10 domains > 10 links from 1 domain) but is (1 link from 10 domains > 100 links from 10 domains)? I’ve got a lot of branded anchor text, which balances out my exact match and partial match keyword anchors from other link building nicely. Another thing to consider is that we host many of our clients which means there are quite a few on the same server with a shared IP. Should I? 1.) Go back into as many of the sites as I can and remove the link from all pages except the home page or a decent PA sub page- keeping a single link from the domain. 2.) Leave all the old stuff alone but start using the single link method on new sites. 3.) Scratch the site credit and just insert an exact-match anchor link in the body of the home page and hide with with CSS like my top competitor seems to be doing quite successfully. (kidding of course.... but my competitor really is doing this.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nbeske0 -
Finding specific name to send email to: Broken Link Building
Hello, I am doing BLB (broken link buidling). I have sites to send emails to for a backlink, but what are all the tricks you know in finding the name of who to contact at these websites? Here's my initial email borrowed from a John Cooper in the comments of this article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/broken-link-building-guide-from-noob-to-novice Hi! I just stumbled across a few broken links on the website, and I didn't know who to notify. Do you think you could help me out? Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Domain Links or SubDomain Links, which is better?
Hi, I only now found out that www.domain.com and www.domain.com/ are different. Most of my external links are directed to www.domain.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
Which I understand is considered the subdomain and not the domain. Should I redirect? (and if so how?)
Should I post new links only to my domain?0 -
Increasing Internal Links But Avoiding a Link Farm
I'm looking to create a page about Widgets and all of the more specific names for Widgets we sell: ABC Brand Widgets, XYZ Brand Widgets, Big Widgets, Small Widgets, Green Widgets, Blue Widgets, etc. I'd like my Widget page to give a brief explanation about each kind of Widget with a link deeper into my site that gives more detail and allows you to purchase. The problem is I have a lot of Widgets and this could get messy: ABC Green Widgets, Small XYZ Widgets, many combinations. I can see my Widget page teetering on being a link farm if I start throwing in all of these combos. So where should I stop? How much do I do? I've read more than 100 links on a page being considered a link farm, is that a hardline number or a general guideline?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rball10 -
Can you advise why my site get outranked by sites with way less authority and so on
Hello SeoMoz, As a new member I first want to thank you guys for your service, seomoz is by far the best resource and toolbox I have ever found. I have a question, or more of a request if you could advise me on what I do wrong.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DennisForte
I have a website: www.letsflycheaper.com with a Domain Authority of 80, and my target keywords are keywords like: cheap business class, business class flights.
My target page is: www.letsflycheaper.com/business-class.php. With all my keywords I am page 2 and I have a real hard time getting on the first page, but if I look at my competitors like: www.wholesale-flights.com with a Domain Authority of 'just' 50, crappy backlinks and so on, they are all on the first page with almost all of my keywords that I want to target. What do I do wrong? Can you maybe give me a couple tips on where I should focus on more? Hopefully you guys can help me... Kind Regards, Ramon van Meer0