Broken Links from Open Site Explorer
-
I am trying to find broken internal links within my site. I found a page that was non-existent but had a bunch of internal links pointing to that page, so I ran an Open Site Explorer report for that URL, but it's limited to 25 URLs.
Is there a way to get a report of all of my internal pages that link to this invalid URL? I tried using the link: search modifier in Google, but that shows no responses.
-
Whew! Big thread.
Sometimes, when you can't find all the broken links to a page, it's easier simply to 301 redirect the page to a destination of your choice. This helps preserve link equity, even for those broken links you can't find on large sites. (and external links, as well)
Not sure if this would help in your situation, but I hope you're getting things sorted out!
-
Jesse,
That's where I started my search, but GWMT wasn't showing this link. I can only presume that because it isn't coming back a 404 (it is showing that "We're Sorry" message instead) that they're considering that message to be content.
Thanks!
-
Lynn, that was a BIG help. I had been running that report, but was restricted to 25 responses. When I saw your suggestion to filter for only internal links, I was able to see all 127.
Big props. Thanks!
-
One more thing to add - GWMT should report all 404 links and their location/referrer.
-
oops! i did not know this. Thanks Irving.
-
Use the word FREE with an asterisk because sreaming frog is now limiting the free version to 500 pages. Xenu is better, even brokenlinkcheck.com lets you spider 3000 pages.
500 pages makes the tool practically worthless for any site of decent size.
-
Indeed if it is not showing a 404, that makes things a bit difficult!
You could try another way, use OSE!
Use the exact page, filter for only internal links, boom 127 pages that link to it. There might be more, but this should get you going!
-
Jesse:
I appreciate your feedback, but am surprised that the ScreamingFrog report found no 404s. SEOmoz found 15 in Roger's last crawl, but those aren't the ones that I'm currently trying to solve.
The problem page is actually showing up as duplicate content, which is kinda screwy. When visiting the page, our normal 404 error doesn't appear (which our developers are still trying to figure out), but instead, an error message appears:
http://www.gallerydirect.com/about-us/media-birchwood
If this were a normal 404 page, we'd probably be able to find the links faster.
-
I got tired of the confusion and went ahead and proved it. Not sure if this is the site you wanted results for, but I used the site linked in your profile (www.gallerydirect.com)
took me about 90 seconds and I had a full list... no 404s though
anyway here's a screenshot to prove it:
http://gyazo.com/67b5763e30722a334f3970643798ca62.png
so what's the problem? want me to crawl the fbi site next?
-
I understand. Thing is, there is a way and the spider doesn't affect anything. Like I said, I have screaming frog installed on my computer and I could run a report for your website right now and you or your IT department would never know it happened.. I just don't understand the part where the software doesn't work for you but to each their own i suppose.
-
Jesse:
That movie was creepy, but John Goodman was awesome in it.
I started this thread because I was frustrated that OSE restricts my results to 25 links, and I simply wanted to find the rest for that particular URL. I was assuming that there was either:
a. A method for getting the rest of the links that Roger found
b. Another way of pulling these reports from someone who already spiders them (since I can't get any using the link:[URL] in Google and Webmaster Tools isn't showing them).
Thanks to all for your suggestions.
-
run the spider based app from outside their "precious network" then. hell, i could run it right now for you from my computer at work if I wanted. Use your laptop or home computer. It's a simple spider you don't have to be within any network to run it. You could run one for CNN.com if you'd like as well...
-
How else do you expect to trace these broken links without using a "spider?"
Obviously it's the solution. And the programs take up all of like 8 megs... so what's the problem/concern?
I second the screaming frog solution. It will tell you exactly what you need to know and has ZERO risk involved (or whatever it is that's hanging you up). The bazooka comparison is ridiculous, because a bazooka destroys your house. Do you really think a spider crawl will affect your website?
Spiders crawl your site and report findings. This happens often whether you download a simple piece of software or not. What do you think OSE is? Or Google?
I guess what we're saying is if you don't like the answer, then so be it. But that's the answer.
PS - OSE uses a spider to crawl your site...
PPS - Do you suffer from arachnophobia? That movie was friggin awesome now I want to watch old Jeff Daniels films.
PPSS - Do you guys remember John Goodman being in that movie? Wow the late 80s early 90s were really somethin' special.
-
John, I certainly see your point, but our IT guys would not take too kindly to me running a spider-based app from inside their precious network, which is why I was looking for a less intrusive solution.
I'm planning on a campaign to revive "flummoxed" to the everyday lexicon next.
-
Hi Darin,
Both these softwares are made for exactly this kind of job and they are not huge system killing programs or anything. Seriously I use one or both almost every day. I suggest downloading them and seeing how you go, I think you will be happy enough with the results.
-
The way I see it, its much like you missing the last flight home, and you have a choice of getting the bus, that means you might take a little longer, or of course you can wait for the next flight ,which happens to be tomorrow evening, the bus will get you home that night.
I get the bus each and every time, I get home, later than expected I grant you, but I get home a lot quicker than waiting for the plane tomorrow.
Bewildered, I didn't realise it had fallen out of the diction, its a common word (I think) in Ireland, oh and I am still young (ish)
-
John:
Bewildered. There's a good word that I'm happy to see someone is keeping it alive for the younger generations.
I'm not ungrateful for your suggestions, but both involve downloading and installing a spider, which seems like overkill, much like using a bazooka to kill a housefly.
-
I am bewildered by this, I have told you one, Lynn has told you another piece of free software that will do this for you.
Anyway, good luck with however you resolve our issues
-
Lynn, part of the problem is definitely template-based, and one of our developers is working on that fix now. However, I also found a number of non-template created links to this page simply due to UBD error (an old Cobol programming term meaning User Brain Dead).
I need to find all of the non-template based, UBD links that may have been created and fix them.
-
Xenu will also do a similar job and doesn't have a limit which I recall the free version of screaming frog has: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
If you have loads of links to this missing page it sounds like you maybe have a template problem with the links getting inserted on every or lots of pages. In that case if you find the point in the template you will have fixed them all at once (if indeed it is like this).
-
Darin
Its a stand alone piece of software you run, it crawls your website and finds out broken inbound, outbound or internal links, tells you them ,you go and fix them
Enter your URL, be it a page or directory, run it, it will give you all bad links. And it wont limit you to 25.
You don't need to implement anything ... run the software once, use it, and well bin it afterwards if you wish
But by all means, you can do as you suggest with SE ...
Regards
John
-
John,
While I could look at implementing such a spider to run the check sitewide on a regular basis, I am not looking to go that far at the moment. For right now, I'm only looking for all of the pages on my site that link to a single incorrect URL. I would have to think that there's a solution available for such a limited search.
If I have to, I suppose I can fix the 25 that Open Site Explorer displays, wait a few days for the crawler to run again, then run the report again, fix the next 25, then so on and so on, but that's going to spread the fix out potentially over a number of weeks.
-
Free tool, non SEO Moz related
http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ , run that, will find all broken links, where they are coming from etc etc
Hope I aint braking any rules posting it
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
-
Links
Hi 64% of our links come from a .com website and only 30% from .co.uk. We only do business in the UK should I continue with the .com links as they are easier to source. Does this hurt my SEO efforts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
SEO question regarding rails app on www.site.com hosted on Heroku and www.site.com/blog at another host
Hi, I have a rails app hosted on Heroku (www.site.com) and would much prefer to set up a Wordpress blog using a different host pointing to www.site.com/blog, as opposed to using a gem within the actual app. Whats are peoples thoughts regarding there being any ranking implications for implementing the set up as noted in this post on Stackoverflow: "What I would do is serve your Wordpress blog along side your Rails app (so you've got a PHP and a Rails server running), and just have your /blog route point to a controller that redirects to your Wordpress app. Add something like this to your routes.rb: _`get '/blog', to:'blog#redirect'`_ and then have a redirect method in your BlogController that simply does this: _`classBlogController<applicationcontrollerdef redirect="" redirect_to="" "url_of_wordpress_blog"endend<="" code=""></applicationcontrollerdef>`_ _Now you can point at yourdomain.com/blog and it will take you to the Wordpress site._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Anward0 -
Moving to a new site while keeping old site live
For reasons I won't get into here, I need to move most of my site to a new domain (DOMAIN B) while keeping every single current detail on the old domain (DOMAIN A) as it is. Meaning, there will be 2 live websites that have mostly the same content, but I want the content to appear to search engines as though it now belongs to DOMAIN B. Weird situation. I know. I've run around in circles trying to figure out the best course of action. What do you think is the best way of going about this? Do I simply point DOMAIN A's canonical tags to the copied content on DOMAIN B and call it good? Should I ask sites that link to DOMAIN A to change their links to DOMAIN B, or start fresh and cut my losses? Should I still file a change of address with GWT, even though I'm not going to 301 redirect anything?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdaniels0 -
Why are these sites outranking me?
I am trying to rank for the phrase "a link between worlds walkthrough" I am on page 1 but there are several results that just outranks me and I cannot see any reason that they would be doing so. My site is hiddentriforce.com/a-link-between-worlds/walkthrough/ For that page I have 5 linking domains, varied anchor text that spans from things like "here" to a variety of related phrases. All of the links come from really good sites My page has 1400 likes, 90 shares, and about 20 each in tweets and +'s DA of 44 PA of 37 The 4 and 5 ranked sites both have WAY less social interactions, lower PA and DA, less links, etc Yet they outrank me why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
What happens when I redirect an entire site to an established page on another site?
Hi There, I have a website which is dedicated to selling ONE product (in different forms) or my main brand site. It is branded similarly, targets similar keywords, and gets some traffic which convert to leads. Additionally, the auxiliary site has a Google Rank 2 in its own right. I am thinking of consolidating this "auxillary" site to the specific product page on my main site. The reason I am considering doing this is to give a "boost" to the main product page on our main site which has many core keywords sitting with SERP ranking of between 11-20 (so not in first 10) Because this auxiliary site it gets traffic and leads in its own right, I don't want this to be to the detriment of my leads overall. Question is - if I 301 redirect the entire domain from my auxillary site to the equivalent product on my main site am I likely to see a large "boost" to that product page? (i.e. will I likely see my ranking rise from 11 - 20 significantly)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | love-seo-goodness0 -
How do I best deal with pages returning 404 errors as they contain links from other sites?
I have over 750 URL's returning 404 errors. The majority of these pages have back links from sites, however the credibility of these pages from what I can see is somewhat dubious, mainly forums and sites with low DA & PA. It has been suggested placing 301 redirects from these pages, a nice easy solution, however I am concerned that we could do more harm than good to our sites credibility and link building strategy going into 2013. I don't want to redirect these pages if its going to cause a panda/penguin problem. Could I request manual removal or something of this nature? Thoughts appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
SEO Link on Clients Site
Hey SEOMozzers, Quick question. In light of the possible 'over-optimisation' penalties pending from Google should we be looking to remove the SEO links to our site from our Clients websites? I appreciate that including a link to our site from an anchor text that includes 'SEO' in it may be like waving a flag to Search Engines saying we are carrying out SEO on our Clients sites. Obviously we would sooner risk a drop in our SEO keyword rankings than risk a penalty of any kind for our Clients. What is the recommended practice here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiroAsh0 -
Fading Text Links Look Like Spammy Hidden Links to a g-bot?
Ah, Hello Mozzers, it's been a while since I was here. Wanted to run something by you... I'm looking to incorporate some fading text using Javascript onto a site homepage using the method described here; http://blog.thomascsherman.com/2009/08/text-slideshow-or-any-content-with-fades/ so, my question is; does anyone think that Google might see this text as a possible dark hat SEO anchor text manipulation (similar to hidden links)? The text will contain various links (4 or 5) that will cycle through one another, fading in and out, but to a bot the text may appear initially invisible, like so; style="display: none;"><a href="">Link Here</a> All links will be internal. My gut instinct is that I'm just being stupid here, but I wanted to stay on the side of caution with this one! Thanks for your time 🙂 http://blog.thomascsherman.com/2009/08/text-slideshow-or-any-content-with-fades
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterAlexLeigh0