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
-
Use the SEOmoz crawl report.
Let Roger loose on your site, then when the report is available, filter the excel file on the broken link field. Then check the "referrer" field for each broken link. The referrer field will show the page where the broken link was discovered.
You can then use the SEOmoz bar to highlight the links on a page. Sometimes a link isn't obvious as it is hidden. In those cases you can always right-click on the page and choose View Page Source from the options, then search for the link.
-
Thanks for the reply.
I should have specified that the links are being reported in Bing webmaster tools and not Google webmaster tools. Bing doesn't seem to tell you where the bad links are.
-
Dreamweaver has a way of searching an entire website if you download the site to Dreamweaver. But webmaster tools should tell you where the links are being found on your site. They typically tell you which URL has the bad links.
-
There are a few ways I would approach this. In order:
-
Run a find in files using one of the text editors I use for coding, either UltraEdit or PhpEd, you can use whatever you are comfortable with,
-
Check the server logs for that page, it should show a referring page, which may not be on your site,
-
or just do a 301 from it to your home page or a relevant page. I have had situations where people link to the wrong page and I redirect them instead of letting it 404,
-
If you are sure it is an actual link on your site, and maybe it is being generated (you didn't post a link so I don't know which site you are referring to) , and not a redirect from somewhere, consider paying someone $5 on http://fiverr.com/ to find 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
-
Slug redirect
Hi All, I'm facing a small yet big problem on one of my sites that I'll try to explain: I have a site with thousands of URL's, all with an odd link structure, like index.php/modules?=name=Video , etc I want to build a proper link structure and for that I'll have to replace that links. My question is: 1. Will I have any relevant SEO problem to do 301 redirects from the old links to the new?
Technical SEO | | nunob.staredition
2. Should I do it all at the same time or do it by parts?
3. What options do I have to avoid give not found errors / redirects for the old links? Thanks for the help.0 -
Disavowing links cause over 2M pages deindexing
can disavowing links cause deindexing from google ? we had about 2.5M pages indexed until dec 30th , since then it s dropped to about 600K We received a unnatural link warning in july, got hit in september, since then we are suffering substantially in ranks and also in business revenue. We've used the disavow tool, and also got tons of links removed within the past 3 , 4 months. Since october we havent got any response from google about what is going on despite sending another recon in Nov 2012. Now the site is getting deindexed. what should we do at this point? Any help is greatly appreciated. here is the url http://goo.gl/Ai17f Thank you nick
Technical SEO | | orion680 -
Website Speed
What are the top 10 ways to reduce page loading times and speed up a website?
Technical SEO | | casper4340 -
What i should do about bad links ?
Hi, my blog is http://www.dota2club.com/ and i have many bad links to my blog what i should do about that and how ? i started 10 days ago guest blogging but my bad links from before are hurting my blog. please help 🙂 thank you !!!
Technical SEO | | wolfinjo0 -
Tips to get rid of a link from an infected website ?
Hi, During some netlinking analysis I found that a website linking to one of the sites I do SEO for triggers my antivirus... It seems infected by JS/Dldr.Scripy.A Java script virus. Being the first time I deal with this kind of problem, and having not found any info on the Q&A or anywhere else, I wonder a few things : 1°) How to verify the reality of the threat and be sure it's not a false positive ? Is there some tool to scan the website, maybe an online vrus scanner ? 2°) How to contact the webmaster since I cannot look for a "contact us" page ? I looked in a whois, but I only got the e-mail of his hosting service, can I contact them directly ? 3°) Any tips or important things I should know ? Thanks for your help
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0 -
URL specific websites with i-framed application
I have 300 URL specific websites that rank well in Yahoo and Bing. Unfortunately I don't have access to the websites due to a previous marketing agreement (before my time). I do have access to the application that is i-framed into the websites. I was thinking about adding a paragraph below the application with a link to the primary website. How does google look at these links. If I add the link, there will be an additional 300 links showing up at the same time. Not what they want to see from my personal knowledge base. At the same time, its not black hat SEO, I am just trying to link to the other websites which I own which are related. What are people thoughts.
Technical SEO | | FidelityOne0 -
If two links from one page link to another, how can I get the second link's anchor text to count?
I am working on an e-commerce site and on the category pages each of the product listings link to the product page twice. The first is an image link and then the second is the product name. I want to get the anchor text of the second link to count. If I no-follow the image link will that help at all? If not is there a way to do this?
Technical SEO | | JordanJudson0 -
Mapping Internal Links (Which are causing duplicate content)
I'm working on a site that is throwing off a -lot- of duplicate content for its size. A lot of it appears to be coming from bad links within the site itself, which were caused when it was ported over from static HTML to Expression Engine (by someone else). I'm finding EE an incredibly frustrating platform to work with, as it appears to be directing 404's on sub-pages to the page directly above that subpage, without actually providing a 404 response. It's very weird. Does anyone have any recommendations on software to clearly map out a site's internal link structure so that I can find what bad links are pointing to the wrong pages?
Technical SEO | | BedeFahey0