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.
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!
-
To find all broken links pointing to your site, you can use various online tools such as Google Search Console, Ahrefs, or SEMrush. These tools allow you to analyze your website's backlink profile and identify any links that lead to pages returning 404 errors or other status codes indicating broken or inaccessible content. Additionally, you can manually check for broken links by reviewing your website's referral traffic, monitoring social media mentions, and conducting periodic audits of your site's content and backlinks.
-
To find all broken links pointing to your site, you can use online tools like Google Search Console's "Links to Your Site" report, which lists external pages linking to your site. Additionally, you can utilize website crawling tools such as Screaming Frog or Ahrefs' Site Explorer to identify broken links from external sources. Regularly monitoring and fixing broken links helps maintain website health, improves user experience, and enhances SEO performance.
-
You can find broken links pointing to your website by using website crawl tools like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs, checking crawl errors in Google Search Console, and monitoring your backlinks with tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush. Regularly checking your referral traffic and using online broken link checkers can also help you identify broken links.
-
You can find broken links pointing to your website by using website crawl tools like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs, checking crawl errors in Google Search Console, and monitoring your backlinks with tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush. Regularly checking your referral traffic and using online broken link checkers can also help you identify broken links.
-
We often use Moz Pro, its a fantastic SEO tool, we also use Screaming Frog as well, we use this to find any broken internal links.
this has helped improve our on-page seo, for our garden office company.
-
Ha, I feel silly. I do use ahrefs, but somehow the broken backlinks tool escaped me. This is perfect, thank you!
-
Hi Steven,
I assume many of these backlinks will be broken because pages were removed from your site without being properly redirected. If that is the case, Open Site Explorer's Link Opportunities (Link Reclamation) tool should be a big help. This will show all 404 URLs with inbound links that you can recapture be 301 redirecting. Additionally, you can look up the backlinks to each of these 404 pages and reach out to each webmaster requesting they update the URL of their link.
I've also had success exporting Top Pages reports (Moz or Majestic are my preferred tools for this), running any URL with a backlink to it through Screaming Frog and pulling 404 pages/broken links (or even 302 redirects) that way. I usually find additional opportunities that do not show up in the Link Reclamation report.
Hope this helps!
-
Use ahrefs and split the crawls for the main folders of the website. Actually, consider the priorities because then you don't have to do all of the 20m. Start with the main ones and go step by step for being able to crawl the majority.
-
I agree with Kevin. Ahref has that capability assuming you don't run into size constraints. Here's a quick post that explains where to find it. (See https://ahrefs.com/blog/turning-broken-links-site-powerful-links-ahrefs-broken-link-checker/.)
-
Have you looked into ahrefs? I know a ton of horsepower behind it, but don't know if it can handle checking 20m. Good luck!
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
-
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 | | timdavis0 -
Can Google Bot View Links on a Wix Page?
Hi, The way Wix is configured you can't see any of the on-page links within the source code. Does anyone know if Google Bots still count the links on this page? Here is the page in question: https://www.ncresourcecenter.org/business-directory If you do think Google counts these links, can you please send me URL fetcher to prove that the links are crawlable? Thank you SO much for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fiyyazp0 -
Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not linked to anywhere on your site?
Hi, We had a content manager request to delete a page from our site. Looking at the traffic to the page, I noticed there were a lot of inbound links from credible sites. Rather than deleting the page, we simply removed it from the navigation, so that a user could still access the page by clicking on a link to it from an external site. Questions: Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not directly accessible from your site? If no: do we keep this page in our Sitemap, or remove it? If yes: what is a better strategy to ensure the inbound links aren't considered "broken links" and also to minimize any negative impact to our SEO? Should we delete the page and 301 redirect users to the parent page for the page we had previously hidden?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jnew9290 -
Can you apply schema to a newsletter signup link?
I was curious if it is possible to markup a newsletter signup link for a client. If yes, what schema property should I use? https://schema.org/Action?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Can a large fluctuation of links cause traffic loss?
I've been asked to look at a site that has lost 70/80% if their search traffic. This happened suddenly around the 17th April. Traffic dropped off over a couple of days and then flat-lined over the next couple of weeks. The screenshot attached, shows the impressions/clicks reported in GWT. When I investigated I found: There had been no changes/updates to the site in question There were no messages in GWT indicating a manual penalty The number of pages indexed shows no significant change There are no particular trends in keywords/queries affected (they all were.) I did discover that ahrefs.com showed that a large number of links were reported lost on the 17th April. (17k links from 1 domain). These links reappeared around the 26th/27th April. But traffic shows no sign of any recovery. The links in question were from a single development server (that shouldn't have been indexed in the first place, but that's another matter.) Is it possible that these links were, maybe artificially, boosting the authority of the affected site? Has the sudden fluctuation in such a large number of links caused the site to trip an algorithmic penalty (penguin?) Without going into too much detail as I'm bound by client confidentiality - The affected site is really a large database and the links pointing to it are generated by a half dozen or so article based sister sites based on how the articles are tagged. The links point to dynamically generated content based on the url. The site does provide a useful/valuable service/purpose - it's not trying to "game the system" in order to rank. That doesn't mean to say that it hasn't been performing better in search than it should have been. This means that the affected site has ~900,000 links pointing to is that are the names of different "entities". Any thoughts/insights would be appreciated. I've expresses a pessimistic outlook to the client, but as you can imaging they are confused and concerned. LVSceCN.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DougRoberts0 -
Redirecting one site to another for link juice
I have two sites with same theme - buying cars. I am going remove one of the sites from being crawled permenantly (ie junkthecars.com) and point domian via 301, to another similar theme site (sellthecars.com). The purpose is to simply pass the SEO link juice from one site to the other as we retire junkthecars.com.... Is a forwarding of the domain OK and the best way for the search engines to increase the rank of sellthecars.com (we hate to wast the link work done on Junkthecars.com)? What dangers should I look for that could hurt sellthecars.com if we do the redirect at a simple TLD?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bestone0 -
Should I 'nofollow' links between my own sites?
We have five sites which are largely unrelated but for cross-promotional purpose our company wishes to cross link between all our sites, possibly in the footer. I have warned about potential consequences of cross-linking in this way and certainly don't want our sites to be viewed as some sort of 'link ring' if they all link to one another. Just wondering if linking between sites you own really is that much of an issue and whether we should 'nofollow' the links in order to prevent being slapped with any sort of penalty for cross-linking.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simon_realbuzz0 -
Finding broken links / resources by topic
Hi fellow mozzers! In an effort to ensure we're exploring every avenue when launching our new website, I was hoping to find some useful broken links / resources that we could incorporate into our link building. We have used the standard tools for this (W3C, Xenu etc), but they all seem to have the same issue in that they reveal all the missing links on a site (although some don't actually tell you the page they are on), but you still have to sort them to see if the links/ resource is related to your theme. When you're on a niche site, this obviously isn't an issue, but on a site like Mashable (to use the example given in a recent SEOmoz blog) it could result in wading through hundreds of links to find one relevant one right at the end. Is there a tool that allows you to specify what theme links you are looking for from a site, or better yet one that allows you to check multiple sites for multiple missing themed links in one go? Or is the best way to export the list and just search the document for certain keywords?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | themegroup0