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
-
When creating parent and child pages should key words be repeated in url and page title?
We are in the direct mail advertising business: PrintLabelAndMail.com Example: Parent:
Technical SEO | | JimDirectMailCoach
Postcard Direct Mail Children:
Postcard Mailings
Postcard Design
Postcard Samples
Postcard Pricing
Postcard Advantages should "postcard" be repeated in the URL and Page Title? and in this example should each of the 5 children link back directly to the parent or would it be better to "daisy chain" them using each as parent for the next?0 -
Responsive design blowing out on page links?
Hi guys, We have a site about to launch with a responsive design to suit desktop, tablet and mobile. Each design carries it's own navigation as one primary set of navigational links won't suit all versions of the design. So as desktop resizes to mobile (or tablet) the desktop navigation is hidden (css) and replaced by the nav more suited to the mobile experience (hope I've explained that ok!). Problem is that if the primary navigation carries 50 links then all 3 designs together carry 150 links which is too many on page links. Is that going to be a problem? Is there a tag that can be applied to the mobile/tablet nav links? Like a canonical tag but for links?? Cheers in advance of your ideas
Technical SEO | | lovealbatross
James0 -
Followed Linking Root Domains and No Followed Linking Domains
If you have more NoFollowed Linking Root Domains than Followed Linking Root Domains is that a problem?
Technical SEO | | INN0 -
404's in WMT are old pages and referrer links no longer linking to them.
Within the last 6 days, Google Webmaster Tools has shown a jump in 404's - around 7000. The 404 pages are from our old browse from an old platform, we no longer use them or link to them. I don't know how Google is finding these pages, when I check the referrer links, they are either 404's themselves or the page exists but the link to the 404 in question is not on the page or in the source code. The sitemap is also often referenced as a referrer but these links are definitely not in our sitemap and haven't been for some time. So it looks to me like the referrer data is outdated. Is that possible? But somehow these pages are still being found, any ideas on how I can diagnose the problem and find out how google is finding them?
Technical SEO | | rock220 -
Can Google show the hReview-Aggregate microformat in the SERPs on a product page if the reviews themselves are on a separate page?
Hi, We recently changed our eCommerce site structure a bit and separated our product reviews onto a a different page. There were a couple of reasons we did this : We used pagination on the product page which meant we got duplicate content warnings. We didn't want to show all the reviews on the product page because this was bad for UX (and diluted our keywords). We thought having a single page was better than paginated content, or at least safer for indexing. We found that Googlebot quite often got stuck in loops and we didn't want to bury the reviews way down in the site structure. We wanted to reduce our bounce rate a little, so having a different reviews page could help with this. In the process of doing this we tidied up our microformats a bit too. The product page used to have to three main microformats; hProduct hReview-Aggregate hReview The product page now only has hProduct and hReview-Aggregate (which is now nested inside the hProduct). This means the reviews page has hReview-Aggregate and hReviews for each review itself. We've taken care to make sure that we're specifying that it's a product review and the URL of that product. However, we've noticed over the past few weeks that Google has stopped feeding the reviews into the SERPs for product pages, and is instead only feeding them in for the reviews pages. Is there any way to separate the reviews out and get Google to use the Microformats for both pages? Would using microdata be a better way to implement this? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | OptiBacUK
James0 -
Why is the Page Authority of my product pages so low?
My domain authority is 35 (homepage Page Authority = 45) and my website has been up for years: www.rainchainsdirect.com Most random pages on my site (like this one) have a Page Authority of around 20. However, as a whole, the individual pages of my products rank exceptionally low. Like these: http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/products/copper-channel-link-rain-chain (Page Authority = 1) http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/collections/todays-deals/products/contempo-chain (Page Authority = 1) I was thinking that for whatever reason they have such low authority, that it may explain why these pages rank lower in google for specific searches using my exact product name (in other words, other sites that are piggybacking of my unique products are ranking higher for my product in a specific name search than the original product itself on my site) In any event, I'm trying to get some perspective on why these pages remain with the same non-existent Page Authority. Can anyone help to shed some light on why and what can be done about it? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | csblev0 -
Google is somehow linking my two sites that aren't linked! HELP
Good Morning... In my Google webmaster account it is showing an increase of backlinks between one site i own to the other.... This should not happen, as there are no links from one site to the other. I have thoroughly checked many pages on the new site to see if i can find a backlink, but i can't. Does anyone know why this is showing like this (google now shows 50,000 links from one site to the other).. Can someone please take a look and see if you can find any link from one to the other... original site : http://goo.gl/JgK1e new site : http://goo.gl/Jb4ng Please let me know why you guys think this is happening or if you were actually able to find a link on the new site pointing back to the old site... thanks a lot
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
2 home page domains causing split in link juice
We have 2 home page domains that are resulting in a split in links. We have mysite.com and mysite.com/index.php. The site is on Joomla and when we try and re-direct the /index.php to just mysite.com is causing an infinite loop. I have done this on other platforms with no problems - is this an issue because of Joomla? How can we complete a 301 re-direct to consolidate our link juice to one domain url?
Technical SEO | | devonkrusich0