Where can I get a list of broken links to my client's website?
-
I have a client who owns a website that attracted a large number of links to internal pages of their sites. Without realising the value of those links, they removed every page of their website other than the home pages that now reads, "new website coming soon".
How can I get a list of every website still linking to the (now broken) internal pages of their site?
-
Hello,
As i may understand, you want to get a list of websites linking to internal pages of your client's website (which are now borken 404). So, you can benefit from that link juice by doing some internal 301 redirects. Welll i have gone through such issues times before, and here are more tahn 1 way to get those links:
1. Google Webmaster Tools: This is the easiest one i think. Go to Google WMT ---> Traffic ---> links to your site ---> You will find a list of top linked pages at top left. (screenshot here: http://i.imgur.com/fFoLEJC.png). Click on "More" (i have it in french here: "plus"). You will geta list of the most popular pages in your site. Click on those pages 1 by 1, and u will get the external inbound links to that page.
2. Open site explorer from Moz.com here: Go fetch the inbound links to that domain, then click on the "top pages" tab. You will have a list with internal pages who received links and social share. Export this to a csv file. Then, take those urls 1 by 1 and fetch their inbound linsk using opensiteexplorer again. You will get a list of ddomains/pages linking to those internal pages 1 by 1 .
3. Use cognietive seo tools. They have a filter by url, so u can exclude hpage and llok for inbound links to remaing pages. But their index is limited (my own opinion)
4. Majestic seo tools: great index, easy-to-use filters so u may exclude hpage and lookup the rest.
Hope it helped.
regards
-
Hi Danny,
Ahrefs (www.ahrefs.com) offers a nice filtering mechanism for excluding target pages during a backlink profile analysis--it's called Baskets. Once you've entered in a root domain (make sure you have .domain/ selected to capture every page), click into the "Top Pages" tab. Within Top Pages, you can 'add all links to basket' by clicking the basket icon w/ green arrow in the header of the 3rd column.
Once you've built your basket, you can hop into the basket management area (basket icon in the top right of the page) and quickly remove the few root level pages from the top of the list. Once removed, you'll be working with an exclusive set of sub-page targets for further reporting and analysis.
-
Play around with Open Site Explorer's Advanced Reports - you can get exactly what you want with some filters.
-
I would use screaming frog SEO spider
http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/
with this guide below
Screaming frog is a tool that will allow you to export in a csv format all of your links including all information I strongly recommend using this guide by Seer interactive
http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide
you can also use a bunch of these tools below and simply copy and paste the broken links.
Tcombination of tools and for instance when you're searching make sure you select root domain so you'll get all pages that had links pointing to them. My favorite and one you're already paying for is open site Explorer however is perfect no tool and cannot pick up every link. My suggestion to get the most of what you're looking for is to use a combination of the tools below. For instance you can use screaming frog SEO spider to check your index status and back links with the top 3 link checkers I've given up to 500 pages for free. Other tools may be needed, and I have supplied a few below that I hope will help just in case. one thing if you do use screaming frog the best guide I've ever found is right here http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ https://www.majesticseo.com/ https://ahrefs.com/index.php http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/ 15 day Trial http://www.linktiger.com/how-to-check-for-broken-links.php http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/tools/ http://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-optimisation-seo/link-building/site-link-checking-tools/ I hope I have been of help to you, Thomas
-
Hi,
In Google Webmaster Tools, you will have the list of the error pages (Crawl errors).
For each of those pages, you will have the inbound links. You have to check it manually or you can create a little script.Kind regards
-
Thanks for the suggestions guys but not exactly what I need.
I can find all links to the site but, specifically, I need a list of all links to the site that are not linking to the home page. I don't have list of these page names (as they now no longer exist).
-
You may use any back link checker software or search "http://www.domain.com" in Google. It will give you all back links
-
Tried using http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/? It has inbound linking functionality.
Alternatively, I'm not entirely sure if this will work, but try going to Google and putting in:
allintext:example.com/page OR intext:example.com
I tried this to find who was linking to our old domain and managed to find a fair few results. If your client ONLY has the home page now, I'm assuming any other page would be "broken"?
References:
- http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html#allintext
- http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html#intext
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
-
What's the difference between these 2 url's in wordpress
https://www.yourdomain.be/blog/-test-article/
Link Building | | conversal
https://www.yourdomain.be/blog/test-article/ What is the difference in wordpress with this "-" in the url? Both url's show the page like it's supposed to. Is this normal?0 -
When we use 'link:' for who get the link, how come google show us the same domain as a link.
the search result show the domain of its own. what is is? and is it meaningful as a link?
Link Building | | onedaykorea0 -
Starting a new site's link campaign... how to approach it?
Over the last few years I have been building content in my niche that I believe rivals some of the best content out there and deserves some attention. Although I have a plan to produce alot more content which I believe will take the quality and quantity of my content into a position among the top 5 or top 10 sites in my niche in the next 1-2 years, I decided that making that massive investment in content production irrespective of a consistent marketing plan is a recipe for failure because I need the positive feedback loop from site visitors to begin now, not in 2 years. Right now I'm in a position where I'm producing content that I think is better than alot of what's out there, and it's just not ranking the way I believe it should. I think I need to do a legitimate link building campaign to establish the website a little more firmly and put it on more level ground with some of its competitors. In Majestic SEO's "fresh index", most of my site's immediate competition have no more than 500 new domains in their links, though the biggest one has some 2,000. How can any link building effort I might take on possibly compare to links of this scale? Is there some "rule of thumb" for how many quality links I should aim for to get on square ground with some of the competitors on the lowest rungs? And if I try to build that many links at once, do I risk sending signals of untrustworthiness? (Assume I'm not going to be looking for any shoddy links, and in general will aim to follow Google guidelines.)
Link Building | | guitarsites0 -
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?
Link Building | | careerealism0 -
Blog's Homepage isn't indexed even though posts are
My blog http://www.cleanedison.com/blog/ doesn't seem to be indexed by Google even though my posts seem to get indexed within a day or so. Is this not necessarily a bad thing? I feel like it would be nice to search "CleanEdison Blog" and get the homepage. The robots say: name="robots" content="noodp,noydir,noarchive" /> Is there anything I can do? P.S. My posts that get picked up by larger entities generally get ranked lower than the offshoot even though I have a rel="canonical" tag. Anything I can do there?
Link Building | | CleanEdisonInc0 -
Multiple link building strategy for multiple clients
We deal with about 200 clients for a series of websites. We create a number of articles articles per site per month. A company we used to do link building for the websites it turns out were doing a lot of spinning which has been hard hit by the new penguin update. I'm actually really happy about it as it means we can now do some legitimate SEO on their sites. Any ideas of what the best strategy would be for this amount of sites which we are already creating shareable content for?
Link Building | | acs1110 -
Ideas for structuring contest to get links?
Hi Mozzers, So I'm getting all set to run a contest. The prizes are great and I've developed a good way to promote it via paid and natural venues. I'm just not sure how to structure the actual contest so the end result is more links than mentions. One idea I had was to make this a story telling contest where the contestant blogs about a good/bad experience within the niche industry and adds a link back to us to enter. Does this seem like to much effort for the user? Prices are worth about $250 each, and I plan to have 3 winners. Any ideas on how to better gear this towards link building is appreciated. Thanks!
Link Building | | ErikDster0 -
Market Samurai's Latest Link Building Tool
Hey, Would be interested to see everyone's opinion on the latest software form Market Samurai http://www.noblesamurai.com/as/video/3 It's basically an article spinning & syndication promising to be the 'biggest in the world'. Most things they mention in the video is quite contradictory to everything SEOmoz teaches about link building. What's everyone's thoughts about Market Samurai and their practices?
Link Building | | LukeyJamo0