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    4. How to find links to 404 pages?

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    How to find links to 404 pages?

    Technical SEO
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    • MarloSchneider
      MarloSchneider last edited by

      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?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • fourthdimensioninc
        fourthdimensioninc last edited by

        where is that little button next to my crawl warnings that lets me open urls, or explore links to that url using OSE?

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • jennita
          jennita @gfiorelli1 last edited by

          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.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
          • gfiorelli1
            gfiorelli1 @MarloSchneider last edited by

            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 🙂

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • MarloSchneider
              MarloSchneider @gfiorelli1 last edited by

              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?

              gfiorelli1 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • ninjamarketer
                ninjamarketer last edited by

                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

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • petrakraft
                  petrakraft last edited by

                  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 ...

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                  • goodnewscowboy
                    goodnewscowboy last edited by

                    Hi Spencer:

                    I don't know if this qualifies as the easiest way , but it ranks right up there:

                    Virante's Recovery Tool

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                    • gfiorelli1
                      gfiorelli1 last edited by

                      You can use Open Site Explorer, but i suggest you to widen the discovery using also Yahoo! SiteExplorer

                      MarloSchneider jennita 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
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