Where can I get a list of broken links to my client's website?

[richdan]

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?

[rikano]

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

[Terakeet]

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.

[SorinaDascalu]

Play around with Open Site Explorer's Advanced Reports - you can get exactly what you want with some filters.

[BlueprintMarketing]

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

[Presencity]

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

[richdan]

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).

[GSM]

You may use any back link checker software or search "http://www.domain.com" in Google. It will give you all back links

[Vuly]

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!