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.
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
-
I want to move some pages of my website to a folder and nav menu in those pages should only show inner page links, will it hurt SEO?
Hi, My website has a few SaaS products, to make my website simple i want to move my website some pages to its specific folder structure , so eg website.com/product1/features
Technical SEO | | webbeemoz
website.com/product1/pricing
website.com/product1/information and same for product2 and so on, the website.com/product1/.. menu will only show the links of product1 and only one link to homepage (possibly in footer). Please share your opinion will it be a good idea, from UI perspective it will be simple , but i am not sure about SEO perspective, please help thanks1 -
404 Error Pages being picked up as duplicate content
Hi, I recently noticed an increase in duplicate content, but all of the pages are 404 error pages. For instance, Moz site crawl says this page: https://www.allconnect.com/sc-internet/internet.html has 43 duplicates and all the duplicates are also 404 pages (https://www.allconnect.com/Coxstatic.html for instance is a duplicate of this page). Looking for insight on how to fix this issue, do I add an rel=canonical tag to these 60 error pages that points to the original error page? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | kfallconnect0 -
Blog Page Titles - Page 1, Page 2 etc.
Hi All, I have a couple of crawl errors coming up in MOZ that I am trying to fix. They are duplicate page title issues with my blog area. For example we have a URL of www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/1 and as we have quite a few blog posts they get put onto another page, example www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/2 both of these urls have the same heading, title, meta description etc. I was just wondering if this was an actual SEO problem or not and if there is a way to fix it. I am using Wordpress for reference but I can't see anywhere to access the settings of these pages. Thanks
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
Should I disavow links from pages that don't exist any more
Hi. Im doing a backlinks audit to two sites, one with 48k and the other with 2M backlinks. Both are very old sites and both have tons of backlinks from old pages and websites that don't exist any more, but these backlinks still exist in the Majestic Historic index. I cleaned up the obvious useless links and passed the rest through Screaming Frog to check if those old pages/sites even exist. There are tons of link sending pages that return a 0, 301, 302, 307, 404 etc errors. Should I consider all of these pages as being bad backlinks and add them to the disavow file? Just a clarification, Im not talking about l301-ing a backlink to a new target page. Im talking about the origin page generating an error at ping eg: originpage.com/page-gone sends me a link to mysite.com/product1. Screamingfrog pings originpage.com/page-gone, and returns a Status error. Do I add the originpage.com/page-gone in the disavow file or not? Hope Im making sense 🙂
Technical SEO | | IgorMateski0 -
How to inform Google to remove 404 Pages of my website?
Hi, I want to remove more than 6,000 pages of my website because of bad keywords, I am going to drop all these pages and making them ‘404’ I want to know how can I inform google that these pages does not exists so please don’t send me traffic from those bad keywords? Also want to know can I use disavow tool of google website to exclude these 6,000 pages of my own website?
Technical SEO | | renukishor4 -
How to find all crawlable links on a particular page?
Hi! This might sound like a newbie question, but I'm trying to find all crawlable links (that google bot sees), on a particular page of my website. I'm trying to use screaming frog, but that gives me all the links on that particular page, AND all subsequent pages in the given sub-directory. What I want is ONLY the crawlable links pointing away from a particular page. What is the best way to go about this? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | AB_Newbie0 -
How to find a specific link on my website (currently causing redirects)
Hi everyone, I've used crawlers like Xenu to find broken links before, and I love these tools. What I can't figure out is how to find specific pieces of code within my site. For example, Webmaster Tools tells me there are still links to old pages somewhere on my website but I just can't find them. Do you know of a crawler that can search for a specific link within the html? Thanks in advance, Josh
Technical SEO | | dreadmichael0
