Discovering broken links to my site
-
How do I find out if other websites are trying to link to my website using a misspelled URL or broken link?
-
One extra resource is this article
http://moz.com/blog/set-it-and-forget-it-seo-chasing-the-elusive-passive-seo-dream
It gives a little more info in researching broken links from other sites, and even gives a great explanation of using the levenshtein distance to automatically correct incoming broken links on the fly.
-
:))
-
Beat me to the punch as I was writing up my response. Thumbs up to you for a good answer that was similar to mine.
-
Depends on the way in which they misspelled things. If they got your domain name correct but messed something up after the slash (i.e. mysite.com/TyposHappne) then you will likely see a notice in Google Webmaster Tools of a 404'd page. At which point you could either ask the webmaster at the other site to fix the link or you could 301 the 404's page to the correct URL. If the incorrect link spells your domain name wrong... well then there's really no easy way to find it. You could potentially run a crawl test on a website that you know does link to you on other pages to see if the test brings up notices of broken links and then check if those broken links were meant for your site. Beyond that I don't believe you can do anything except hope the site administrator or their SEO runs their own tests to check for broken links and then fixes them accordingly.
-
One of the best way to check links that comes to your site is to use backlink checker software (open site explorer). If the main url is mis-spelt i don't think you can find out using the software as the url wouldn't point to your website at all. If you requested the link your self from a website, you can only find out by visiting the website and checking the link.
To check the broken links, I use broken link checker software and i do redirect or fix the links so if there are any links coming through to those pages it'll be fixed or redirected. I use brokenlinkcheck.com or screaming frog to check broken links.
I hope that helps.
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
-
Will noindex pages still get link equity?
We think we get link equity from some large travel domains to white label versions of our main website. These pages are noindex because they're the same URLs and content as our main B2C website and have canonicals to the pages we want indexed. Question is, is there REALLY link equity to pages on our domain which have "noindex,nofollow" on them? Secondly we're looking to put all these white label pages on a separate structure, to better protect our main indexed pages from duplicate content risks. The best bet would be to put them on a sub folder rather than a subdomain, yes? That way, even though the pages are still noindex, we'd get link equity from these big domains to www.ourdomain.com/subfolder where we wouldn't to subdomain.ourdomain.com? Thank you!
Reporting & Analytics | | HTXSEO0 -
Are these Search Console crawl errors a major concern to new client site?
We recently (4/1) went live with a new site for a client of ours. The client site was originally Point2 before they made the switch to a template site with Real Estate Webmasters. Now when I look into the Search Console I am getting the following Crawl Errors: 111 Server Errors (photos) 104 Soft 404s (blogs, archives, tags) 6,229 Not Found (listings) I have a few questions. The server errors I know not a lot about so I generally ignore. My main concerns are the 404s and not found. The 404s are mostly tags and blog archives which I wonder if I should leave alone or do 301s for each to /blog. For not found, these are all the previous listings from the IDX. My assumption is these will naturally fall away after some time, as the new ones have already indexed. But I wonder what I should be doing here and which will be affecting me. When we launched the new site there was a large spike in clicks ( 250% increase) which has now tapered off to an average of ~85 clicks versus ~160 at time of launch. Not sure if the Crawl Errors have any effect, I'm guessing not so much right now. I'd appreciate your insights Mozzers!
Reporting & Analytics | | localwork0 -
What is the most effective way of selecting a top keyword per page on a site?
We are creating fresh content for outdated sites and I need to identify the most significant keyword per page for the content developers, What is the best way to do this?
Reporting & Analytics | | Sable_Group0 -
Large event site - how should I structure my URLs?
Hi guys, I'm working on a new website which is consolidating a number of existing event sites into one. The existing sites use a variety of URL structures: www.eventsite1.com/events/event-name www.eventsite2.com/festival-program/event-name www.eventsite3.com/event-name This inconsistency has led to issues with tracking category usage properly in analytics - for instance, with eventsite3.com, events fall within categories (www.eventsite3.com/category-name) but as soon as you drill into an event detail page (www.eventsite3.com/event-name) from the category page, the category is lost to analytics. This is compounded when one event lives within multiple categories, as I can't figure out which category is the most effective for a particular event. I've seen other event sites establish a canonical URL for a primary category, display it in the URL (i.e. www.eventsite4.com/primary-category/event-name) yet still let that event get hit via the secondary categories (www.eventsite4.com/secondary-category/event-name). This way, the categories get passed to analytics without any duplicate content issues (i.e. via the setting of canonicals) Basically, I want to make sure that whatever instruction I give to the devs for the new site re: URL structure is correct from an SEO perspective and analytics perspective. Do I even need to worry about having the category in the URL? Can someone please help me with this? Hope this makes sense Cheers
Reporting & Analytics | | cos20300 -
How to put structured data on your site?
HI All, I Would like to know your views on structured data on your site. What are the qualities and point that should keep in mind when we talking about the "structured data on your site". how we can apply structured data. How we use data highlighter for the website which don't have any events. your thoughts please.
Reporting & Analytics | | lucidsoftech
thanks0 -
Bing Won't Index Site - Help!
For the past few weeks I’ve been trying to figure out why my client's site is not indexed on bing and yahoo search engines. My Google analytics is telling me I’m getting traffic (very little traffic) from Bing almost daily but Bing webmaster tools is telling me I’ve received no traffic and no pages have been indexed into Bing since the beginning of December. At once point I was showing ranking in Bing for only one keyword then all of a sudden none of my pages were being indexed and I now rank for nothing for that website. From Google I’m getting over 1200 visits per month. I have been doing everything I can to possibly find the culprit behind this issue. I feel like the issue could be a redirect problem. In webmaster tools on Bing I’ve used “Fetch as Bingbot” and every time I use it I get a Status of “Redirection limit reached.”. I also checked the CRAWL Information and it’s saying all the URL’s to the site are under 301 redirect. A month or so ago the site was completely revamped and the canonical URL was changed from non www to www. I have tried manually adding pages to be indexed multiple times and Bing will not index any of the sites pages. I have submitted the sitemap to Bing and I am now at a loss. I don’t know what’s going on and why I can’t get the site listed on Bing. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | VITALBGS
Stephen0 -
Internal site referrers
Hi, So I have a segment of my website-let’s call it /examplea, I am trying to figure out how many visits I have to /examplea from all other areas of my website i.e. /exampleb, /examplec etc to /examplea so almost internal site refers to a particular segment of my website, Any thoughts on how to do this within Google analytics ? Marc
Reporting & Analytics | | NRMA0 -
Organic bounce rate after site re-launch
3 months ago a client of mine re-launched theoir web site (after having a lot of work done on it). Since then, many of the SEO indications are good - more non-paid keywords sending search visits, more organic visits overall, more URLs receiving entrances via search, etc. The issue is that their bounce rate has been increasing pretty much EVERY week since. Has anyone seen a similar issue and what could a potential solution be for this? Thanks everyone!
Reporting & Analytics | | CathalOMaoilfhinn0