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 to find links to 404 pages?
-
I know that I used to be able to do this, but I can't seem to remember.
One of the sites I am working on has had a lot of pages moving around lately. I am sure some links got lost in the fray that I would like to recover, what is the easiest way to see links going to a domain that are pointing to 404 pages?
-
where is that little button next to my crawl warnings that lets me open urls, or explore links to that url using OSE?
-
Specifically in Open Site Explorer, check out the "Top Pages" tab to see if any of your top linked to pages are returning a 404. This tab is actually the first one I look at when running analysis of a site.
-
Sorry for the delay in my answer.
When you have detected all the 404 of your website, you can use the "Explore URL" search in Siteexplorer. If are still existing backlinks to those pages, Yahoo Siteexplorer will show them.
To be sure I just did a try with an 404 of a new client of mine, and just discovered that one 404 page was linked by a Yale University page... obviously I've just made an 301
-
As familiar as I am with Yahoo SiteExplorer I have never used it to find external links that go to pages that are no longer there. How can I do this with that tool?
-
Hello Spencer,
I recommend two tools
1. Xenu link sleuth (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html#Download)
2. Gsitecrawler ( http://gsitecrawler.com/en/download/)
Both will report all the linked pages throwing a 404 error and other status codes including "forbidden request", "no connection", "no such host" and more.
Hope this helps.
Sameer
-
Did you look into the Google Webmaster Tools already? There you can see them as well - of course not all. But you have to check from time to time - they don't show up all together. If you fix some perpaps some more will come up ...
-
Hi Spencer:
I don't know if this qualifies as the easiest way , but it ranks right up there:
-
You can use Open Site Explorer, but i suggest you to widen the discovery using also Yahoo! SiteExplorer
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
-
Best way to link to multiple location pages
I am a Magician and have multiple location pages for each county I cover. I currently have them linked off the menu under locations/ <county>and also in the footer</county> However I have heard that a link from the page is much stronger, so I am experimenting with removing the Menu & Footer link and just linking to these pages from within the content. It's not really a navigation item and most people come in through search to the right page. Am I diluting the link by having it in the Menu/Page and Footer? I read a long time ago that Google only considers the first link to a page and ignores the rest - is that the case? Thanks Roger https://www.rogerlapin.co.uk/
Technical SEO | | Rogerperk0 -
Getting rid of pagination - redirect all paginated pages or leave them to 404?
Hi all, We're currently in the process of updating our website and we've agreed that one of the things we want to do is get rid of all our pagination (currently used on the blog and product review areas) and instead implement load more on scroll. The question I have is... should we redirect all of the paginated pages and if so, where to? (My initial thoughts were either to the blog homepage or to the archive page) OR do we leave them to just 404? Bear in mind we have thousands of paginated pages 😕 Here's our blog area btw - https://www.ihasco.co.uk/blog Any help would be appreciated, thanks!
Technical SEO | | iHasco0 -
Can you use Screaming Frog to find all instances of relative or absolute linking?
My client wants to pull every instance of an absolute URL on their site so that they can update them for an upcoming migration to HTTPS (the majority of the site uses relative linking). Is there a way to use the extraction tool in Screaming Frog to crawl one page at a time and extract every occurrence of _href="http://" _? I have gone back and forth between using an x-path extractor as well as a regex and have had no luck with either. Ex. X-path: //*[starts-with(@href, “http://”)][1] Ex. Regex: href=\”//
Technical SEO | | Merkle-Impaqt0 -
How Does Google's "index" find the location of pages in the "page directory" to return?
This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched. These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory". The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls. Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.
Technical SEO | | reidsteven750 -
How does Google find /feed/ at the end of all pages on my site?
Hi! In Google Webmaster Tools I find *.../feed/ as a 404 page in crawl errors. The problem is that none of these pages exist and they have no inbound links (except the start page). FYI, it´s a wordpress site. Example: www.mysite.com/subpage1/feed/ www.mysite.com/subpage2/feed/ www.mysite.com/subpage3/feed/ etc Does Google search for /feed/ by default or why do I keep getting these 404´s every day?
Technical SEO | | Vivamedia0 -
Does Google pass link juice a page receives if the URL parameter specifies content and has the Crawl setting in Webmaster Tools set to NO?
The page in question receives a lot of quality traffic but is only relevant to a small percent of my users. I want to keep the link juice received from this page but I do not want it to appear in the SERPs.
Technical SEO | | surveygizmo0 -
How to find a specific link on my website (currently causing redirects)
Hi everyone, I've used crawlers like Xenu to find broken links before, and I love these tools. What I can't figure out is how to find specific pieces of code within my site. For example, Webmaster Tools tells me there are still links to old pages somewhere on my website but I just can't find them. Do you know of a crawler that can search for a specific link within the html? Thanks in advance, Josh
Technical SEO | | dreadmichael0