Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Can we retrieve all 404 pages of my site?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Can we retrieve all 404 pages of my site?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    5
    11
    5145
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • mtthompsons
      mtthompsons last edited by

      Hi,

      Can we retrieve all 404 pages of my site?

      is there any syntax i can use in Google search to list just pages that give 404?

      Tool/Site that can scan all pages in Google Index and give me this report.

      Thanks

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • matbennett
        matbennett last edited by

        The 404s in webmaster tools relate to crawl errors. As such they will only appear if internally linked. It also limits the report to the top 1000 pages with errors only.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Clickatell2
          Clickatell2 last edited by

          Set up a webmaster tools account for your site. You should be able to see all the 404 error urls.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • matbennett
            matbennett last edited by

            I wouldn't try to manually remove that number of URLs.  Mass individual removals can cause their own problems.

            If the pages are 404ing correctly, then they will be removed. However it is a slow process. For the number you are looking at it will mostly likely take months.  Google has to recrawl all of the URLs before it even knows that they are returning a 404 status.  It will then likely wait a while and do it again before removing then.  That's a painful truth and there really is not anything much you can do about it.

            It might (and this is very arguable) be worth ensuring that there is a crawl path to the 404 content. So maybe a link from a high authority page to a "recently removed content" list that contains links to a selection and keep replacing that list. This will help that content get recrawled more quickly, but it will also mean that you are linking to 404 pages which might send quality signal issues.  Something to weigh up.

            What would work more quickly is to mass remove in particular directories (if you are lucky enough that some of your content fits that pattern).  If you have a lot of urls in mysite.com/olddirectory and there is definitely nothing you want to keep in that directory  then you can lose big swathes of URLs in one hit - see here:  https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663427?hl=en

            Unfortunately that is only good for directories, not wildcards. However it's very helpful when it is an option.

            So, how to find those URLs?  (Your original question!!).

            Unfortunately there is no way to get them all back from google.  Even if you did a search for site:www.mysite.com and saved all of the results it will not return the number of results that you are looking for.

            I tend to do this by looking for patterns and removing those to find more patterns.  I'll try to explain:

            1. Search for site:www.yoursite.com
            2. Scroll down the list until you start seeing a pattern. (eg mysite.com/olddynamicpage-111.php , mysite.com/olddynamicpage-112.php , mysite.com/olddynamicpage-185.php  etc) .
            3. Note that pattern (return later to check that they all return a 404 )
            4. Now search again with that pattern removed, site:www.mysite.com -inurl:olddynamicpage
            5. Return to step 2

            Do this (a lot) and you start understanding the pattern that have been picked up.  There are usually a few that account for large number of the incorrectly indexed URLs. In the recent problem I did they were almost all relating to "faceted search gone wrong".

            Once you know the patterns you can check that the correct headers are being returned so that they start dropping out of the index. If any are directory patterns then you can remove than in big hits through GWMT.

            It's painful. It's slow, but it does work.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • mtthompsons
              mtthompsons last edited by

              Yes you need right at the same time to know which of the google indexed ones are 404

              As google does not remove the dead 404 pages for months and was thinking to manually add them for removal in webmaster tools but need to find all of them that are indexed but 404

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • matbennett
                matbennett last edited by

                OK - that is a bit of a different problem (and a rather familiar one).  So the aim is to figure out what the 330 "phantom" pages are and then how to remove them?

                Let me know if I have that right. If I have then I'll give you some tips based on me doing to same with a few million URLs recently.  I'll check first though, as it might get long!

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • mtthompsons
                  mtthompsons last edited by

                  Thanks you

                  I will try explaining my query again and you can correct me if the above is the solution again

                  1. My site has 70K pages

                  2. Google has indexed 500K pages from the site

                  Site:mysitename shows this

                  We have noindexed etc on most of them which is got down the counts to 300K

                  Now i want to find the pages that show 404 for our site checking the 300K pages

                  Webmaster shows few hundred as 404 but am sure there are many more

                  Can we scan the index rather then the site to find the ones Google search engine has indexed that are 404

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • matbennett
                    matbennett last edited by

                    As you say, on site crawlers such as Xenu & Screaming frog will only tell you when you are linking to 404 pages, not where people are linking to your 404 pages.

                    There are a few ways you can get to this data:

                    Your server logs : All 404 errors will be recorded on your server.  If someone links to a non-existent page and that link is ever followed by a single user or a crawler like google-bot, that will be recorded in your server log files.  You can access those directly (or pull 404s out of them on a regular, automatic basis).  Alternatively most hosting comes with some form of log analysis built in (awstats being one of the most common).  That will show you the 404 errors.

                    That isn't quite what you asked, as it doesn't mean that they have all been indexed, however that will be an exhaustive list that you can then check against.

                    Check that backlinks resolve : Download all of your backlinks (OSE, webmaster tools, ahreafs, majestic), look at the target and see what header is returned.  We use a custom build tools called linkwatchman to do this on an automatic regular basis. However as an occasional check you can download in to excel and use the excellent SEO Tools for excel to do this for free. ( http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/  <- best seo tool around)

                    Analytics : As long as your error pages trigger the google analytics tracking code you can get the data from here as well.  Most helpful when the page either triggers a custom variable, or uses a virtual url ( 404/requestedurl.html for instance).  Isolate the pages and look at where the traffic came from.

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                    • Modi
                      Modi @mtthompsons last edited by

                      It will scan and list you all results, like 301 redirect, 200, 404 errors, 403 errors. However, screaming frog can spider upto 500 urls in there free product

                      If you have more, suggest to go with Xenu Link Sleuth. Download it, get your site crawled and get all pages including server error 404 to unlimited pages.

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote -1
                      • mtthompsons
                        mtthompsons last edited by

                        Thanks but this would be scanning pages in my site. How will i find 404 pages that are indexed in Google?

                        Modi 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • TomRayner
                          TomRayner last edited by

                          Hey there

                          Screaming Frog is a great (and free!) tool that lets you do this.  You can download it here

                          Simply insert your URL and it will spider all of the URLs it can find for your site.  It will then serve up a ton of information about the page, including whether it is a 200, 404, 301 or so on.  You can even export this information into excel for easy filtering.

                          Hope this helps.

                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote -1
                          • 1 / 1
                          • First post
                            Last post

                          Got a burning SEO question?

                          Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                          Start my free trial


                          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.

                          • See all categories

                          Related Questions

                          • PKI_Niles

                            For FAQ Schema markup, do we need to include every FAQ that is on the page in the markup, or can we use only selected FAQs?

                            The website FAQ page we are working on has more than 50 FAQs. FAQ Schema guidelines say the markup must be an exact match with the content. Does that mean all 50+ FAQs must be in the mark-up? Or does that mean the few FAQs we decided to put in the markup are an exact match?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PKI_Niles
                            0
                          • timdavis

                            Breaking up a site into multiple sites

                            Hi, I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content. I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last.  I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites? Thank you in advance.

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timdavis
                            0
                          • StevenLevine

                            How can I find all broken links pointing to my site?

                            I help manage a large website with over 20M backlinks and I want to find all of the broken ones. What would be the most efficient way to go about this besides exporting and checking each backlink's reponse code? Thank you in advance!

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StevenLevine
                            3
                          • SolveWebMedia

                            My site shows 503 error to Google bot, but can see the site fine. Not indexing in Google. Help

                            Hi, This site is not indexed on Google at all. http://www.thethreehorseshoespub.co.uk Looking into it, it seems to be giving a 503 error to the google bot. I can see the site I have checked source code Checked robots Did have a sitemap param. but removed it for testing GWMT is showing 'unreachable' if I submit a site map or fetch Any ideas on how to remove this error? Many thanks in advance

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SolveWebMedia
                            0
                          • PeteC12

                            Ecommerce Site homepage , Is it okay to have Links as H2 Tags as that is relevant to the page ?

                            Hi All, I have a Rental site and I am bit confused with how best do my H Tags on my homepage I know the H1 is the most important, Then H2 Tags and so on.. and that these tags should really be titles for content. However, I have a few categories (links) on my homepage so I am wondering if I could put these as H2 Tags given that it is relevant to the page . H3 Tags will my News and Guides etc , H4 Tags will the whats on the footer. I am attached a made up screenshot of what I propose for my homepage  if someone could please  give it a quick look ,  it would be very much appreciated. I have looked at what some competitors do a lot of them don't seem to have h2's etc but I know it's an important factor for rankings etc. Many thanks Pete dJSFQwI

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC12
                            0
                          • lcourse

                            Is it a problem to use a 301 redirect to a 404 error page, instead of serving directly a 404 page?

                            We are building URLs dynamically with apache rewrite.
                            When we detect that an URL is matching some valid patterns, we serve a script which then may detect that the combination of parameters in the URL does not exist. If this happens we produce a 301 redirect to another URL which serves a 404 error page, So my doubt is the following: Do I have to worry about not serving directly an 404, but redirecting (301) to a 404 page? Will this lead to the erroneous original URL staying longer in the google index than if I would serve directly a 404? Some context. It is a site with about 200.000 web pages and we have currently 90.000 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (even though only 600 detected last month).

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
                            0
                          • brad-causes

                            Do search engines crawl links on 404 pages?

                            I'm currently in the process of redesigning my site's 404 page. I know there's all sorts of best practices from UX standpoint but what about search engines? Since these pages are roadblocks in the crawl process, I was wondering if there's a way to help the search engine continue its crawl. Does putting links to "recent posts" or something along those lines allow the bot to continue on its way or does the crawl stop at that point because the 404 HTTP status code is thrown in the header response?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brad-causes
                            0
                          • pulseseo

                            Does Google crawl the pages which are generated via the site's search box queries?

                            For example, if I search for an 'x' item in a site's search box and if the site displays a list of results based on the query, would that page be crawled? I am asking this question because this would be a URL that is non existent on the site and hence am confused as to whether Google bots would be able to find it.

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseseo
                            0

                          Get started with Moz Pro!

                          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                          Start my free trial
                          Products
                          • Moz Pro
                          • Moz Local
                          • Moz API
                          • Moz Data
                          • STAT
                          • Product Updates
                          Moz Solutions
                          • SMB Solutions
                          • Agency Solutions
                          • Enterprise Solutions
                          Free SEO Tools
                          • Domain Authority Checker
                          • Link Explorer
                          • Keyword Explorer
                          • Competitive Research
                          • Brand Authority Checker
                          • Local Citation Checker
                          • MozBar Extension
                          • MozCast
                          Resources
                          • Blog
                          • SEO Learning Center
                          • Help Hub
                          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                          • How-to Guides
                          • Moz Academy
                          • API Docs
                          About Moz
                          • About
                          • Team
                          • Careers
                          • Contact
                          Why Moz
                          • Case Studies
                          • Testimonials
                          Get Involved
                          • Become an Affiliate
                          • MozCon
                          • Webinars
                          • Practical Marketer Series
                          • MozPod
                          Connect with us

                          Contact the Help team

                          Join our newsletter
                          Moz logo
                          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                          • Accessibility
                          • Terms of Use
                          • Privacy

                          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.