How to find and fix 404 and broken links?
-
Hi, My campaign is showing me many 404 problems and other tools are also showing me broken links, but the links they show me dose work and I cant seem to find the broken links or the cause of the 404.
Can you help?
-
Hi Yoseph,
If you liked the broken link checker Chrome plugin then you could check out another Chrome plugin that the company I work for created. It's called Redirect Path and I use it all the time. It's a handy header and redirect checker that flags up any 301, 302, 404 & 500 errors on any page you visit.
Hope that helps!
-
Only a plus to Adam's response: remember to design custom 404 pages. It's a good idea to include links to pages you want to rank, a search box or a list of featured pages (post, categories, etc.) At least, it may help to keep users staying in your website.
Hope it helps.
Sergio.
-
Adam, any more good links and tools that you can share with me? I see you know "something" about SEO and web-building...
-
No problem. Happy to help.
-
Thanks Adam, Great help!!!!
You made my life much easier!
-
Hi Yoseph,
To find broken links I like to use the Check My Links plugin for Chrome.
As for the 404 errors. I believe there is a way to view which pages are linking to them using the SEOMoz tools but I prefer to just use the Screaming Frog spider. Once you have crawled the site with this tool, all you need to do is select the response codes tab at the top, filter by Client Error (4xx) then click on the links and select the In Links tab at the bottom to see the linking page.
Hope that helps,
Adam.
-
Thanks for your time.
I just cant find any broken links... I don't understand what you answered
-
I think you need to post the URL! Have you tried the links from every page? Although personally I would use an include file to reduce errors and maintenance time, but not sure if you are...
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
-
Trying to find all internal links to a specific page (without index)
Hi guys -- Still waiting on Moz to index a page of mine. We launched a new site over two months ago. In the meantime, I really just need a list of internal links to a specific page because I want to change its URL. Does anybody know how to find that list (of internal links to 1 of my pages) without the Moz index? I appreciate the help!
Technical SEO | | marchexmarketingmcc1 -
We just fixed a Meta refresh, unified our link profile and now our rankings are going crazy
Crazy in a bad way!I am hoping that perhaps some of you have experienced this scenario before and can shed some light on what might be happening.Here is what happened:We recently fixed a meta refresh that was on our site's homepage. It was completely fragmenting our link profile. All of our external links were being counted towards one URL, and our internal links were counting for the other URL. In addition to that, our most authoritative URL, because it was subject to a meta refresh, was not passing any of its authority to our other pages.Here is what happened to our link profile:Total External Links: Before - 2,757 After - **4,311 **Total Internal Links: Befpre - 125 After - 3,221
Technical SEO | | danatanseo
Total Links: Before - 2,882 After - 7,532Yeah....huge change. Great right? Well, I have been tracking a set of keywords that were ranking from spots 10-30 in Google. There are about 66 keywords in the set. I started tracking them because at MozCon last July Fabio Riccotta suggested that targeting keywords showing up on page 2 or 3 of the results might be easier to improve than terms that were on the bottom of page 1. So, take a look at this. The first column shows where a particular keyword ranked on 11/8 and the second column shows where it is ranking today and the third column shows the change. For obvious reasons I haven't included the keywords.11/8 11/14 Change****10 44 -34
10 26 -16
10 28 -18
10 34 -24
10 25 -15
15 29 -14
16 33 -17
16 32 -16
17 24 -7
17 53 -36
17 41 -24
18 27 -9
19 42 -23
19 35 -16
19 - Not in top 200
19 30 -11
19 25 -6
19 43 -24
20 33 -13
20 41 -21
20 34 -14
21 46 -25
21 - Not in top 200
21 33 -12
21 40 -19
21 61 -40
22 46 -24
22 35 -13
22 46 -24
23 51 -28
23 49 -26
24 43 -19
24 47 -23
24 45 -21
24 39 -15
25 45 -20
25 50 -25
26 39 -13
26 118 - 92
26 30 -4
26 139 -113
26 57 -31
27 48 -21
27 47 -20
27 47 -20
27 45 -18
27 48 -21
27 59 -32
27 55 -28
27 40 -13
27 48 -21
27 51 -24
27 43 -16
28 66 -38
28 49 -21
28 51 -23
28 58 -30
29 58 -29
29 43 -14
29 41 -12
29 49 -20
29 60 -31
30 42 -12
31 - Not in top 200
31 59 -28
31 68 -37
31 53 -22Needless to say, this is exactly the opposite of what I expected to see after fixing the meta refresh problem. I wouldn't think anything of normal fluctuation, but every single one of these keywords moved down, almost consistently 20-25 spots. The further down a keyword was to begin with, it seems the further it dropped.What do you make of this? Could Google be penalizing us because our link profile changed so dramatically in a short period of time? I should say that we have never taken part in spammy link-building schemes, nor have we ever been contacted by Google with any kind of suspicious link warnings. We've been online since 1996 and are an e-commerce site doing #RCS. Thanks all!0 -
Mass 404 Checker?
Hi all, I'm currently looking after a collection of old newspaper sites that have had various developments during their time. The problem is there are so many 404 pages all over the place and the sites are bleeding link juice everywhere so I'm looking for a tool where I can check a lot of URLs at once. For example from an OSE report I have done a random sampling of the target URLs and some of them 404 (eek!) but there are too many to check manually to know which ones are still live and which ones have 404'd or are redirecting. Is there a tool anyone uses for this or a way one of the SEOMoz tools can do this? Also I've asked a few people personally how to check this and they've suggested Xenu, Xenu won't work as it only checks current site navigation. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | thisisOllie0 -
Self-referencing links
I personally think that self-referencing links are silly. It's blatantly easy for Google to tell and my instinct says that the link juice for this would simply evaporate rather than passing back to itself. Does anyone have information backing me up from an authoritative source? I can't find any info about this linked to Matt Cutts, Rand or any of those I look up to.
Technical SEO | | IPROdigital0 -
How to fix this 404 : Error ( 4XX (Client Error) )
In my report this indicates 404 : Error http://www.thexxxhouse.com/what_sets_us_aparat.html This web page removed from server .How to fix this in SEO friendly way .
Technical SEO | | innofidelity0 -
How to get rid of back links?
I would like to clear all of the links linking to us to start over fresh? Our site has become non existent on Google with no messages or warning from them through webmaster tools. From tools on here and other sources it indicates that we should be ranked ahead of our competitors or atleast comparable. We are not found under the keywords that we use to be...."parts washers" "part washer" industrial cleaning systems etc.. our site is www.vortexpartswashers.com. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | mhart0 -
Paid outbound links - do they have juice?
Hi, A client is asking about a website that has a business model I don't normally work with - it's a site full of very informative articles - no harm there - and they are sponsored by companies who provide the service being discussed. Not really any harm there. But attached to the link is an outbound tracking device. The business model is pay per click. Has anyone had experience with this, specifically if larger search engines have picked up on this and filtered out those types of links to not count very much if at all? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | lilactree0 -
We have a ton of legacy links that include /?ref=tracking-goes-here. We need concile this, can the conical tag be used to fix this? How?
www.firehost.com/?ref=pressrelease example - http://cl.ly/2O1d1x2m3b1b3K1K0h2J
Technical SEO | | FirePowered0