How can I find all broken links pointing to my site?
-
I help manage a large website with over 20M backlinks and I want to find all of the broken ones. What would be the most efficient way to go about this besides exporting and checking each backlink's reponse code?
Thank you in advance!
-
To find all broken links pointing to your site, you can use various online tools such as Google Search Console, Ahrefs, or SEMrush. These tools allow you to analyze your website's backlink profile and identify any links that lead to pages returning 404 errors or other status codes indicating broken or inaccessible content. Additionally, you can manually check for broken links by reviewing your website's referral traffic, monitoring social media mentions, and conducting periodic audits of your site's content and backlinks.
-
To find all broken links pointing to your site, you can use online tools like Google Search Console's "Links to Your Site" report, which lists external pages linking to your site. Additionally, you can utilize website crawling tools such as Screaming Frog or Ahrefs' Site Explorer to identify broken links from external sources. Regularly monitoring and fixing broken links helps maintain website health, improves user experience, and enhances SEO performance.
-
You can find broken links pointing to your website by using website crawl tools like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs, checking crawl errors in Google Search Console, and monitoring your backlinks with tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush. Regularly checking your referral traffic and using online broken link checkers can also help you identify broken links.
-
You can find broken links pointing to your website by using website crawl tools like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs, checking crawl errors in Google Search Console, and monitoring your backlinks with tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush. Regularly checking your referral traffic and using online broken link checkers can also help you identify broken links.
-
We often use Moz Pro, its a fantastic SEO tool, we also use Screaming Frog as well, we use this to find any broken internal links.
this has helped improve our on-page seo, for our garden office company.
-
Ha, I feel silly. I do use ahrefs, but somehow the broken backlinks tool escaped me. This is perfect, thank you!
-
Hi Steven,
I assume many of these backlinks will be broken because pages were removed from your site without being properly redirected. If that is the case, Open Site Explorer's Link Opportunities (Link Reclamation) tool should be a big help. This will show all 404 URLs with inbound links that you can recapture be 301 redirecting. Additionally, you can look up the backlinks to each of these 404 pages and reach out to each webmaster requesting they update the URL of their link.
I've also had success exporting Top Pages reports (Moz or Majestic are my preferred tools for this), running any URL with a backlink to it through Screaming Frog and pulling 404 pages/broken links (or even 302 redirects) that way. I usually find additional opportunities that do not show up in the Link Reclamation report.
Hope this helps!
-
Use ahrefs and split the crawls for the main folders of the website. Actually, consider the priorities because then you don't have to do all of the 20m. Start with the main ones and go step by step for being able to crawl the majority.
-
I agree with Kevin. Ahref has that capability assuming you don't run into size constraints. Here's a quick post that explains where to find it. (See https://ahrefs.com/blog/turning-broken-links-site-powerful-links-ahrefs-broken-link-checker/.)
-
Have you looked into ahrefs? I know a ton of horsepower behind it, but don't know if it can handle checking 20m. Good luck!
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
-
Links from a penalised site.
Hey Mozzers, Recently we have had a series of agencies in to pitch for work, one group mentioned that due to our association with a possibly penalised product review website, any links and activity associated with the brand would hinder our SEO. We currently have a good rating, but we are now no longer pushing our customers to the site as we move to a new platform. The current link back from this website is also no-followed. Any thoughts on how this could impact us? And how the agencies determined the site was penalised and causing us problems. Cheers Tim
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TimHolmes0 -
Merging Two Unrelated Sites into a Third Site
We have a new client interested in possibly merging 2 sites into one under the brand of a new parent company. Here's a breakdown of the scenario..... BrandA.com sells a variety of B2B widget-services via their online store. BrandB.com sells a variety of B2B thing-a-majig products and services (some of them large in size) not sold through an online store. These are sold more consultatively via a sales team. The new parent company, BrandA-B.com is considering combining the two sites under the new brand parent company domain. The Widget-services and Thing-A-Majigs have very little similarity or purchase crossover; so just because you're interested in one doesn't make you a good candidate for the other. We feel pretty confident that we can round-up all the necessary pages and inbound links to do proper transitioning to a new, separate third domain though we're not in agreement that this is the best course of action. Currently the individual brand sites are fairly well known in their industry and each ranks fairly well for a variety of important terms though there is room for improvement and each site has good links with the exception of the new site which has considerably fewer. BrandA.com DA = 73 - 19 years old
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OPM
BrandB.com DA = 55 - 18 years old
BrandA-B.com DA = 40 - 1 year old Our SEO team members have opinions on what the potential outcome(s) of this would be but are wondering what the community here thinks. Will the combining of the sites cause a dilution of the topics of the two sites and hurt rankings? Will the combining of the domain authority help one set part of the business but hurt the other? What do you think? What would you do?0 -
Can 410 links trigger a penalty?
Hi! This is a follow on question from my other post - http://moz.com/community/q/site-dropped-after-recovery. As mentioned there, I've ad a manual penalty revoked for http://www.newyoubootcamp.com/. This came after the forum was hacked and some poor quality SEO was done. We've managed to clean a large amount of links, but ones such as http://about1.typepad.com/blog/2014/04/tweetdeck-to-launch-as-html5-web-app-now-accepting-beta-testers.html (anchor is "microsoft") are still being found and indexed. My question is that although the forum is now 410'd, can these junk links still be causing any harm? A huge amount have been disavowed, and many others taken down after a manual outreach campaign, but still others are appearing. The site is performing poorly in search despite having a much better domain authority, driven by largely great links from national newspapers, than its competitors, as well as solid user metrics such as a bounce rate of 30% and few on-site issues. This makes me think it must be the link profile. Any advice would be much appreciated. S
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Site wide links removal
A website of mine has about 4,000 backlinks of which 2,500 of them are coming from one website to the homepage and about 6 internal pages. These have been built up over about 5 years, mainly via article posts. The site was recently hit via penguin 2.0 but has only had natural links built so i'm wondering if the sitewide links are in fact the issue? The website linking to mine is an authority source within its niche but the concern is the amount of backlinks coming from this one site and if it may now be seen as having a negative impact. When ive reviewed the links from this one site via a backlink removal tool about 80% seem fine and suggestions are to remove about 20% of the backlinks. Would you keep all the sitewide backlinks or remove them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jazavide
Have you come across a similar situation and how did it affect ranking/traffic?0 -
Broken links and Angular.js technology
I generated a report for a potential client and there were a few things wrong, including broken links (404 error). I suggested to fix them and here's what he replied: The site uses a technology called Angular.js. It outputs results using the 'item.url' in the URL. It is just a placer in a code loop that is outputted correctly by the browser to point to correct link. We use Angular.js because it allows us to have the filtering system on overview pages like the dining tables page.Angular.js is a Google technology – and they host a full explanation about how to use it at http://angularjs.orgAs backup, we also output Angular.js links in a standard form (which appears further down the page when looking at the source code).As it's a relatively new technology (since 2009), it is also evolving. If there's a better way of delivering SEO using angular.js it'd be great to hear about it.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Well, I am not going to lie, that I haven't heard about Angular.js, so I'm not sure how to answer this.Please adviseWarmly,Dominica
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dominicaalicia0 -
Large site rel=can or no-index?
Hi, A large site with tens of thousands of pages, but lots of the pages are very similar. The site is about training courses, and the url structure is something like: training-course/date/time I only really want the search engines to index the actual training course pages, which is the better option for me and why?: a) rel=canonical b) noindex, nofollow Thanks, Gary.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cottamg0 -
Can a Hosting provider that also hosts adult content sites negatively affect our SEO rankings on a non-adult site hosted on same platform?
We're considering moving a site to a host that also offers hosting for adult websites. Can this have a negative affect on SEO, if our hosting company is in any way associated with adult websites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grapevinemktg0 -
Affiliate Links Added and Site Dropped in only Google
My site was dropshipping a product and we switched to an affiliate offer. We had three 4 links to different affiliate products. Our site dropped the next day. I have been number 1 for 6 months, has a pr 6 and is 2 years old. It has been 2 weeks and the site hasn't jumped back. Any suggestions on how to handle this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dkash0