How can I find and fix my broken links
-
There are a number(110) links that SEOmoz has found to have 404 errors. I have been able to find and fix many of them but there are links that are coming from our home page that do not seem to exist. I cannot even find the links in our system in wordpress. Is there something obvious that I am missing? Is there a way to locate where the links are originating from?
-
HI Paul,
I agree 100% with you, in the case you want to check external links. That's why I try to solve my errors on GWT so I can see new external errors showing up.
However in this case I got confused by this sentence:
_ I have been able to find and fix many of them but there are links that are coming from our home page that do not seem to exist._
I thought that he was speaking aboiut links generated inside his homepage. However if the case are external links, I recommend spry advice, but only for few links. If you have many of them you can consider to use GWT API and download all the broken links with their own linking urls. An information which google used to share before but that now is not available in GWT (at least not in mine)
-
Mememax, you're talking about a completely different situation.
Screaming Frog/Xenu are only capable of broken links that your own site links to.
The SEOMoz and WMT crawls are finding missing pages that other sites are linking to on your site. I.e. broken incoming links as opposed to broken internal links.
While both are good to check, if you aren't watching for and fixing your 404s that other sites are linking to, you are potentially throwing away hugely valuable incoming link juice. (Hint: it's even more valuable juice than what is passing from your internal links)
A simple example of this occurs when you just move a page to a new URL, and update your own site's navigation. A Screaming Frog crawl would show no 404 as a result (because you updated your own site's link), but all the incoming links to that moved page could now be 404ing. It's entirely possible that other sites were linking to that page. If you don't watch your broken incoming links reports either in SEOMoz to WMT, you won't know that those other sites are still trying to link. And then you'd be throwing away that incoming link equity.
Makes sense?
Paul
P.S, Of course, you can also monitor your 404s in Google Analytics, but that only shows you broken incoming links that are getting traffic. The other tools mentioned will show you nearly all the broken incoming links even if they're not currently driving traffic. By fixing them, you'll rescue the ranking value and also be ready if they later start to drive actual referral traffic.
-
Sincerely I've never used seomoz tools for crawwling my site to find 404s.
I always used screamingfrog/xenu(last one is free), which gives you not only the url where the error is found but also the type of links and its anchor text. In that way it would be easy to quick find the error, because maybe it's a realtive links which is malformed and pointing to a non existing url.
-
Funny, there was just a question about this a few hours ago (hint, hint SEOmoz team). Here was my advice...
The SEOmoz report will give you one referrer for each 404 error. I've had better success and more complete information using Google Webmaster Tools. You get the information "straight from the horse's mouth" as it were.
- Log in to https://www.google.com/webmasters/
- Go to Health > Crawl Errors
- Click "Not Found"
- For each listed, click the URL
- In the pop up window, the third tab will list the pages that link in.
-
Click on "Export to csv" in the top right hand corner of your crawl report.
When the file downloads, there is a field called "referrer" which will tell you the exact page the broken link was found on.
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
-
Link Building
I have a question as competitor made backlinks on longtail keywords and just for one specific post, If I wanna rank in Google SERP, then should I have to do the same strategy as my competitor did. or can I use just my own keywords to get rank?
Link Building | | aamirmurtaza670 -
Can i link my two websites
Hello , I have two website in the same domain but for 2 differents country. Can I put a link in both of them? If yes, should the links be NO follow? here is the two websites : https://gebetszeiten-kalender.de/ , https://preghiera-orario.it/ Thanks in advance
Link Building | | islam2france0 -
Am I better off with ten links from one site or one link from ten sites?
I am writing a series of linked-back articles for a highly-ranked web publisher, but wonder if I'd be better off sharing the articles across different sites. My goal is to grow our domain authority and SEO rankings.
Link Building | | Lysarden0 -
Link Building
Hi Mozzers, I work for an IT company specialising in outsourcing Cisco Engineers worldwide. Due to being involved heavily in outsourcing, I'm finding it impossible to generate genuine and organic links to our website. My question is that is it essential to have back links back to our website to achieve high search engine rankings? I'm unable to get clients and other partners to provide links as we're the outsourced company,but I can get backlinks from unrelated c ompanies. For example we're running a CSR initiative with a National Gym relating to health & fitness, also links from our web designers etc... Do these links have any type of value? Any help and feedback would be greatly appreciated. Jason 🙂
Link Building | | 4Cornernetworks0 -
Nasty links
Hi My first q on here (hoorah!), and it's about links (boo!). I've got what appears to be a handful (but worryingly, increasing in number) of links pointing to my site like this: http://condos.mrgulffront.com/florida-condos-for-sale/320-scenic-gulf-drive-miramar-beach-fl-32550-mls-567591/ I've made contact with the sites concerned, and had only one positive response who flatly denied all knowledge of it. The issue (as far as I can see) is that as in the above example the links (on the bottom right in the grey box) are forever changing so not always visible. Can anyone offer any guidance as to these kinds of nasty links.... I'm right at the v beginning on this "path of seo understanding" so please don't assume prior knowledge! Thanks in advance.... tom
Link Building | | T-J-I0 -
Link building for rankings VS Link building for relationships
A Big Shout To Everyone -- Good Morning and What's Up 🙂 As I read today through seomoz professional guide to link building and the section why link building matters and in addition to this a newsletter I received today that changed my whole thinking towards link building for rankings vs for relationships. It is already happening on social networks if you are active there, but what about on your website. What are your thoughts on the following ? Google's job is provide the most relevant results to surfers online, and looking the link profile of a site & the page itself is the key to determining which page to serve on plate to the surfers link query ! Webmasters Site Objective:
Link Building | | helpwanted
I think that we as webmasters have to ask ourselves what do we want to achieve with link building. To get quick traffic or build slow authority links, high rankings, lead generation, sales & other things here I may be missing etcccc Other Objective Networking & Relationship Building Alliances : What I discovered today is that building links for 1st page rankings are great and will provide me with steady traffic, but not all of it is targeted traffic, but what else can I do to bring targeted traffic and at the same time try to build alliances with other related non competing business owners online. The idea... is to apply old school networking / relationship building alliances to get targeted traffic to my site that can actually benefit from my services. How Do We Achieve This I become a editor for approving resource links for me site, only the best will be placed on my site as a resource. Build a valuable tightly themed categorized resource section with related non competing resources that can help my sites visitors find what they are looking for, send visitors to non competing resources that may purchase their services which helps me build a relationship with them, and may can with rankings as well, provided I am selective with my qualification process. Questions & Concerns Below : What should I be thinking about when creating a resource categorized links page How many outgoing do follow links should I allow from this links partner page How will this links resource page affect my own SE 1st Page Rankings and is it worth it based on getting targeted traffic Any pros / cons I may be missing here0 -
Buying links
I have 2 websites to pay monthly to gain links from, number 1 is on the homepage of a directory, it has a PA of 90 and DA of 88.
Link Building | | myloseo
the link will be on the right hand side along with 55 other featured sites.
these links are there throughout the whole site. number 2 is from a website with 20 max sponsored links on a page and will be one of the sub pages on the site with a PA of 74. How valuable if any would these links be? My current pa on the site i wish to send the links to is 26 Can i expect my PA to go up by much? Also i currently have 317 links from 7 root domains on my site will this effect the rank of the paid links? Thanks in advance0 -
What percentage of my links should be directory links
I feel a lot of my link building might be a bit heavy on the directory links side. Should I limit the percentage amount of links as a part of my overall link profile? If yes what percentage of links is ok to be directory links?
Link Building | | iSenseWebSolutions0