How to find links to 404 pages?
-
I know that I used to be able to do this, but I can't seem to remember.
One of the sites I am working on has had a lot of pages moving around lately. I am sure some links got lost in the fray that I would like to recover, what is the easiest way to see links going to a domain that are pointing to 404 pages?
-
where is that little button next to my crawl warnings that lets me open urls, or explore links to that url using OSE?
-
Specifically in Open Site Explorer, check out the "Top Pages" tab to see if any of your top linked to pages are returning a 404. This tab is actually the first one I look at when running analysis of a site.
-
Sorry for the delay in my answer.
When you have detected all the 404 of your website, you can use the "Explore URL" search in Siteexplorer. If are still existing backlinks to those pages, Yahoo Siteexplorer will show them.
To be sure I just did a try with an 404 of a new client of mine, and just discovered that one 404 page was linked by a Yale University page... obviously I've just made an 301
-
As familiar as I am with Yahoo SiteExplorer I have never used it to find external links that go to pages that are no longer there. How can I do this with that tool?
-
Hello Spencer,
I recommend two tools
1. Xenu link sleuth (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html#Download)
2. Gsitecrawler ( http://gsitecrawler.com/en/download/)
Both will report all the linked pages throwing a 404 error and other status codes including "forbidden request", "no connection", "no such host" and more.
Hope this helps.
Sameer
-
Did you look into the Google Webmaster Tools already? There you can see them as well - of course not all. But you have to check from time to time - they don't show up all together. If you fix some perpaps some more will come up ...
-
Hi Spencer:
I don't know if this qualifies as the easiest way , but it ranks right up there:
-
You can use Open Site Explorer, but i suggest you to widen the discovery using also Yahoo! SiteExplorer
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 redirecting a logged in user from a public page to an equivalent private page (not visible to google) impact SEO?
Hi, We have public pages that can obviously be visited by our registered members. When they visit these public pages + they are logged in to our site, we want to redirect them to the equivalent (richer) page on the private site e.g. a logged in user visiting /public/contentA will be redirected to /private/contentA Note: Our /public pages are indexed by Google whereas /private pages are excluded. a) will this affect our SEO? b) if not, is 302 the best http status code to use? Cheers
Technical SEO | | bernienabo0 -
404 page cannot be created - Best solution?
Hi all, i am helping a frind with his page, he is very shot on money and cannot spend a dime on programers or learn how to create a 404 page.
Technical SEO | | Gaston Riera
His web is in php laravel, also i dont know how to create one. My options are: Leave the 404 page to be just like that. Redirect, via .htaccess to homepage. What should recommend him to do? Thanks!
GR.0 -
New Page Showing Up On My Reports w/o Page Title, Words, etc - However, I didn't create it
I have a WordPress site and I was doing a crawl for errors and it is now showing up as of today that this page : https://thinkbiglearnsmart.com/event-registration/?event_id=551&name_of_event=HTML5 CSS3 is new and has no page title, words, etc. I am not even sure where this page or URL came from. I was messing with the robots.txt file to allow some /category/ posts that were being hidden, but I didn't re-allow anything with the above appendages. I just want to make sure that I didn't screw something up that is now going to impact my rankings - this was just a really odd message to come up as I didn't create this page recently - and that shouldnt even be a page accessible to the public. When I edit the page - it is using an Event Espresso (WordPress plugin) shortcode - and I don't want to noindex this page as it is all of my events. Sorry this post is confusing, any help or insight would be appreciated! I am also interested in hiring someone for some hourly consulting work on SEO type issues if anyone has any references. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | webbmason0 -
Is the Authority of Individual Pages Diluted When You Add New Pages?
I was wondering if the authority of individual pages is diluted when you add new pages (in Google's view). Suppose your site had 100 pages and you added 100 new pages (without getting any new links). Would the average authority of the original pages significantly decrease and result in a drop in search traffic to the original pages? Do you worry that adding more pages will hurt pages that were previously published?
Technical SEO | | Charlessipe0 -
Crawl Test Report only shows home page and no inner site pages?
Hi, My site is [removed] When I first tried to set up a new campaign for the site, I received the error: Roger has detected a problem: We have detected that the root domain [removed] does not respond to web requests. Using this domain, we will be unable to crawl your site or present accurate SERP information. I then ran a Crawl Test per the FAQ. The SEOmoz crawl report only shows my home page URL and does not have any inner site pages. This is a Joomla site. What is the problem? Thanks! Dave
Technical SEO | | crave810 -
Ecommerce website with too many links on page
Hi, I'm working on onsite seo for an ecommerce website and my recent report has shown that I have a high number of pages where there are 'too many links on page'. Does anyone have tips on how to avoid this when we're using mega menus, plenty of navigation for the user and links to products on each page? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Will_Craig1 -
URL Structure for "Find A Professional" Page
I've read all the URL structure posts out there, but I'm really undecided and would love a second opinion. Currently, this is how the developer has our professionals directory working: 1. You search by inputting your Zip Code and selecting a category (such as Pool Companies) and we return all professionals within a X-mile radius of that ZIP. This is how the URL's are structured... 1. Main Page: /our-professionals 2. The URL looks like this after a search for "Deck Builders" in ZIP 19033: /our-professionals?zipcode=19033&HidSuppliers=&HiddenSpaces=&HidServices=&HidServices_all=[16]%2C&HidMetroareas=&srchbox= 3. When I click one of the businesses, URL looks like this: viewprofile.php?id=409 I know how to go about doing this, but I'm undecided on the best structure for the URL's. Maybe for results pages do this: find-professionals/deck-builders/philadelphia-pa-19033 And for individual pro's profiles do this: /deck-builders/philadelphia-pa-19033/Billys-Deck-Service Any input on how to best structure this so that we can have a good chance of showing in SERPs for "Deck Builders near New Jersey" and the such, would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | zDucketz0 -
Do I need to add canonical link tags to pages that I promote & track w/ UTM tags?
New to SEOmoz, loving it so far. I promote content on my site a lot and am diligent about using UTM tags to track conversions & attribute data properly. I was reading earlier about the use of link rel=canonical in the case of duplicate page content and can't find a conclusive answer whether or not I need to add the canonical tag to these pages. Do I need the canonical tag in this case? If so, can the canonical tag live in the HEAD section of the original / base page itself as well as any other URLs that call that content (that have UTM tags, etc)? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | askotzko1