How can I find and fix my broken links

[careerealism]

There are a number(110) links that SEOmoz has found to have 404 errors. I have been able to find and fix many of them but there are links that are coming from our home page that do not seem to exist. I cannot even find the links in our system in wordpress. Is there something obvious that I am missing? Is there a way to locate where the links are originating from?

[mememax]

HI Paul,

I agree 100% with you, in the case you want to check external links. That's why I try to solve my errors on GWT so I can see new external errors showing up.

However in this case I got confused by this sentence:

_ I have been able to find and fix many of them but there are links that are coming from our home page that do not seem to exist._

I thought that he was speaking aboiut links generated inside his homepage. However if the case are external links, I recommend spry advice, but only for few links. If you have many of them you can consider to use GWT API and download all the broken links with their own linking urls. An information which google used to share before but that now is not available in GWT (at least not in mine)

[ThompsonPaul]

Mememax, you're talking about a completely different situation.

Screaming Frog/Xenu are only capable of broken links that your own site links to.

The SEOMoz and WMT crawls are finding missing pages that other sites are linking to on your site. I.e. broken incoming links as opposed to broken internal links.

While both are good to check, if you aren't watching for and fixing your 404s that other sites are linking to, you are potentially throwing away hugely valuable incoming link juice. (Hint: it's even more valuable juice than what is passing from your internal links)

A simple example of this occurs when you just move a page to a new URL, and update your own site's navigation. A Screaming Frog crawl would show no 404 as a result (because you updated your own site's link), but all the incoming links to that moved page could now be 404ing. It's entirely possible that other sites were linking to that page. If you don't watch your broken incoming links reports either in SEOMoz to WMT, you won't know that those other sites are still trying to link. And then you'd be throwing away that incoming link equity.

Makes sense?

Paul

P.S, Of course, you can also monitor your 404s in Google Analytics, but that only shows you broken incoming links that are getting traffic. The other tools mentioned will show you nearly all the broken incoming links even if they're not currently driving traffic. By fixing them, you'll rescue the ranking value and also be ready if they later start to drive actual referral traffic.

[mememax]

Sincerely I've never used seomoz tools for crawwling my site to find 404s.

I always used screamingfrog/xenu(last one is free), which gives you not only the url where the error is found but also the type of links and its anchor text. In that way it would be easy to quick find the error, because maybe it's a realtive links which is malformed and pointing to a non existing url.

[sprynewmedia]

Funny, there was just a question about this a few hours ago (hint, hint SEOmoz team).  Here was my advice...

The SEOmoz report will give you one referrer for each 404 error.  I've had better success and more complete information using Google Webmaster Tools. You get the information "straight from the horse's mouth" as it were.

1. Log in to https://www.google.com/webmasters/
2. Go to Health > Crawl Errors
3. Click "Not Found"
4. For each listed, click the URL
5. In the pop up window, the third tab will list the pages that link in.

[GeorgeDavis]

Click on "Export to csv" in the top right hand corner of your crawl report.

When the file downloads, there is a field called "referrer" which will tell you the exact page the broken link was found on.