Identify Page Not Found Visits

[HankHoffmeier]

Hello everyone! I have always known enough about Google Analytics and SEO to be dangerous, but was not a focus for me. I am working on a project were I am looking at stuff where my knowledge is limited.

The scenario is that the domain I am looking at will serve a 404 error, but keeps the url, I guess for tracking purposes.

At the same time, there is a page "Page_Not_Found" that has elevated visits.

1. I am not sure how to tell where the visits are coming from to the PNF since the Previous Page is mostly identified as "(entrance)"

2. Is the PNF correlated to the process of serving an error page but not changing the URL?

Ideally, I am looking to identify and improve the 404 visits. I hope that I provided clear enough information. Happy to provide more as needed.

[HankHoffmeier]

@cayk I am not sure how to do that, but I might be able to research and ask around. Thank you.

[CAYK]

@hankhoffmeier Additional to the other replies here, if you can add an image unique to the 404 error, you could get the information you're hunting for server-side by measuring the hits to the image in question. Many server side reporting tools will also allow showing image downloads by URL, which would workaround your core issue that with regard to the 404 URLS themselves.

[HankHoffmeier]

@lynnpatchett Thank you. I tried ScreamingFrog. Where is did help with some items, it did not help me with the overall problem. I will keep researching.

[kleser81]

@lynnpatchett said in Identify Page Not Found Visits:

If you think you have internal links to 404 pages try https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/ - it is a tool to crawl your site and you can filter for your 404s and then see which of your pages the links are on. It is a real timesaver! The free version has some restrictions but should be enough to get you started,

Thank you for the link. That worked for me!

[HankHoffmeier]

@lynnpatchett Thank you. I will take a look at both!

[LynnPatchett]

@hankhoffmeier Hi, bit of a late reply but try the following:

1. In analytics you can go to the behavior -> site content -> landing page report and the filter for your page not found url (or page title if it is common across 404s). This will give you external sites that are linking to one of your 404 pages.

2. If you think you have internal links to 404 pages try https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/ - it is a tool to crawl your site and you can filter for your 404s and then see which of your pages the links are on. It is a real timesaver! The free version has some restrictions but should be enough to get you started,

Hope it helps!