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.
Find all external 404 errors/links?
-
Hi All,
We have recently discovered a site was linking to our site but it was linking to an incorrect url, resulting in a 404 error. We had only found this by pure chance and wondered if there was a tool out there that will tell us when a site is linking to an incorrect url on our site?
Thanks
-
If you dont have access to the logs that could be an issue - not really any automated tools out there as it would need to crawl every website and find 404 errors.
I haven't tried this - so its just an idea. Go into GSC download all the links pointing to your site (and from places like Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic) and then chuck that list of urls into Screaming Frog or URL Profiler and look at external links and see if any are returning a 404. Not sure if this would work - its just an idea.
Thanks
Andy
-
Great, will take a look. Maybe run a trial to see if it does exactly what I need
Thanks for the info!
-
Good idea!
Although some of our clients that we do SEO for aren't hosting their websites on our server and we don't have access to their server logs etc.
Was hoping for an automated dashboard like MOZ/Screaming Frog/ or A hrefs as mentioned above. Due to the amount of clients we have, opening up and running through all there Log files could be time consuming.
Cheers for the info though, may come in use in the future, or to someone else reading this
-
Hi
The best way I have found is to look in your server logs, its the only true place to find out what Google is doing on your site.
Download the logs and look at all the 404 errors - quite simple and depending on size of your logs can take you around 5 minutes worth a work - the longer time period you can analyse in your logs the better.
Thanks
Andy
-
Hi David.
Ahrefs.com offers that service: broken links.
Another way to do that search could be this: Downloading the historic backlinks list and with a mass checker, check where do they point nowdays. I've used GScraper and its option to crawl outbound links.
Best Luck.
GR.
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
-
URL Structure On Site - Currently it's domain/product-name NOT domain/category/product name is this bad?
I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Best strategy to handle over 100,000 404 errors.
I recently been given a site that has over one-hundred thousand 404 error codes listed in Google Webmasters. It is really odd because according to Google Webmasters, the pages that are linking to these 404 pages are also pages that no longer exist (they are 404 pages themselves). These errors were a result of site migration that had occurred. Appreciate any input on how one might go about auditing and repairing large amounts of 404 errors. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | SEO_Promenade0 -
Do I use /es/, /mx/ or /es-mx/ for my Spanish site for Mexico only
I currently have the Spanish version of my site under myurl.com/es/ When I was at Pubcon in Vegas last year a panel reviewed my site and said the Spanish version should be in /mx/ rather than /es/ since es is for Spain only and my site is for Mexico only. Today while trying to find information on the web I found /es-mx/ as a possibility. I am changing my site and was planning to change to /mx/ but want confirmation on the correct way to do this. Does anyone have a link to Google documentation that will tell me for sure what to use here? The documentation I read led me to the /es/ but I cannot find that now.
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Find all links in the site and anchor text
Hi, Find all links in the site and anchor text and i need this done on my own website so i know if we dont have links that are anchored to numbers and punctuations that are not seen at all. Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Are 404 Errors a bad thing?
Good Morning... I am trying to clean up my e-commerce site and i created a lot of new categories for my parts... I've made the old category pages (which have had their content removed) "hidden" to anyone who visits the site and starts browsing. The only way you could get to those "hidden" pages is either by knowing the URLS that I used to use or if for some reason one of them is spidering in Google. Since I'm trying to clean up the site and get rid of any duplicate content issues, would i be better served by adding those "hidden" pages that don't have much or any content to the Robots.txt file or should i just De-activate them so now even if you type the old URL you will get a 404 page... In this case, are 404 pages bad? You're typically not going to find those pages in the SERPS so the only way you'd land on these 404 pages is to know the old url i was using that has been disabled. Please let me know if you guys think i should be 404'ing them or adding them to Robots.txt Thanks
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Can you have a /sitemap.xml and /sitemap.html on the same site?
Thanks in advance for any responses; we really appreciate the expertise of the SEOmoz community! My question: Since the file extensions are different, can a site have both a /sitemap.xml and /sitemap.html both siting at the root domain? For example, we've already put the html sitemap in place here: https://www.pioneermilitaryloans.com/sitemap Now, we're considering adding an XML sitemap. I know standard practice is to load it at the root (www.example.com/sitemap.xml), but am wondering if this will cause conflicts. I've been unable to find this topic addressed anywhere, or any real-life examples of sites currently doing this. What do you think?
Technical SEO | | PioneerServices0 -
404 crawl errors from "tel:" link?
I am seeing thousands of 404 errors. Each of the urls is like this: abc.com/abc123/tel:1231231234 Everything is normal about that url except the "/tel:1231231234" these urls are bad with the tel: extension, they are good without it. The only place I can find this character string is on each page we have this code which is used for Iphones and such. What are we doing wrong? Code: Phone: <a href="[tel:1231231234](tel:7858411943)"> (123) 123-1234a>
Technical SEO | | EugeneF0 -
Should there be a canonical tag on my 404 error page?
In my crawl diagnostics, I notice some 4xx client errors. They are appearing for pages that no longer exist, so I'm not sure what the problem is. Shouldn't they just be dealt as 404's? Anyway, on closer inspection I noticed that my 404 error page contains a canonical tag which points to the missing page. Could this be the issue? Is it a good idea to remove the canonical tag from this error page? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Leighm0