Best free tool to check internal broken links
-
Question says it all I guess. What would your recommend as the best free tool to check internal broken links?
-
[Spammy comment removed by forum moderator.]
-
How awesome is that Screaming Frog tool?
-
Hey Kevin,
If you download the CSV report, we should list the referring page in the CSV. I know it'd be better to have it on the on-screen report, and it is on our wish list, but you should be able to see the info in an export.
-
Hi Kevin
Thanks - yes, although I am a Moz Associate, out of full transparency I agree with that you are saying. It is not a tool I specifically use with Moz, and do prefer Screaming Frog for the exact functions you are referring to. Screaming Frog will tell you what pages the bad links are on.
You can definitely pass this on to the product team as a feature request on this page. Personally I love tools like their analytics, keyword difficulty, rank tracker, open site explorer, but I agree from this aspect the crawler is not the strongest, and I would suggest supplementing with Screaming Frog (as I do).
-Dan
-
Dan, although I love me some MOZ the crawl diagnostics kinda suck... all they do is report errors but they don't give any insight on where the bad link is originated... it merely shows the page which is 404ed, which is a BIG FAT WASTE OF TIME.
You guys should know that we need to know WHICH PAGE THE BAD LINK IS ON, and furthermore WHAT LINE OF CODE HAS THE BAD LINK. Who cares about the broken page!?!?!?!?!?
-
Yes when you set up a campaign with Moz Analytics, Moz will crawl your website and return a whole report of suggestions. It will start a sample crawl which gets returned to you pretty quickly, and a full crawl a little bit thereafter. It will report things to you like 400 errors etc.
You can also use the Moz Crawl Test (PRO only as well) which will return to you the HTTP status code of each URL crawled.
Optionally, you can also use Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free up to 500 pages to crawl, paid for bigger sites).
-Dan
-
Does anyone have any clue on how I can check my internal broken links using MOZ tools?
-
Hello,
If you have a full Sitemap, transform it to a .txt by putting only URL (Excel can do that easily) try Screaming Frog SEO on list mode, which is free regardless of the number of links.
Even if you search a free tool, I strongly recommand to invest 99£/year on this tool, it's worth it.
-
Ok, first, does the url with /errors/error_404 (without the query string) exist?
Also - are you using something to create your 404 pages for tracking purposes?
The query string on the url would appear to be stating the referring url anyway - hence ?q=-i3 basically equates to the page /i3
At a guess - it could be there is a script running to create logs on specific 404's, or create a new log each time one occurs - if this folder is visable to the crawlers, it would get spidered and subsequently the problem would arise.
-
Yeah I tried that but the URL in the URL coloumn shows for example:
/errors/error_404?q=-i3
and the Referrer shows:
/-i3
Neither page exists and so I do not know where the page which contains this broken link is...
-
It does, when you get the report, filter column D marked "4XX (Client Error)" and you will see your 404's there - further along in the report you will also be able to see referring url which will show you which page is linking to it.
-
Checked out the tool I just linked to on here and it doesn't include broken link data
-
Is the the custom crawl tool on here you are referring too? http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test
-
Custom crawl right here on SEOmoz, or you could use Xenu
-
Hi Dan,
Thanks for that tool. It works great and especially like that it works in Chrome.
Do you however know of a tool which would do this site wide rather than per page?
-
This tool is a great extension for Chrome
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
-
Internal Linking issue
So i am working with a review company and I am having a hard time with something. We have created a category which lists and categorizes every one of our properties. For example a specific property in the category "restaurant" would be as seen below: /restaurant/mcdonalds /restaurant/panda-express And so on and so on. What I am noticing however is that our more obscure properties are not being linked to by any page. If I were to visit the page myurl.com/restaurant I would see 100+ pages of properties, however it seems like only the properties on the first few pages are being counted as having links. So far the only way I have been able to work around this issue is by creating a page and hiding it in our footer called "all restaurants". This page lists and links to every one of our properties. However it isn't exactly user friendly and I would prefer scrapers not to be able to scrape all properties at once! Anyway, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Glossary Page - best practice
Hi guys, We have a glossary on our website. All terms are accessible via a 'view all' URL, however we also have each letter on their own URL, e.g /a. Currently the rel=canonical tag for all the individual letter pages points to the view all URL. I'm just wondering whether that is best practice or not, as currently not all the individual letter pages are being indexed. Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | brian-madden0 -
Should I add 'nofollow' to site wide internal links?
I am trying to improve the internal linking structure on my site and ensure that the most important pages have the most internal links pointing to them (which I believe is the best strategy from Google's perspective!). I have a number of internal links in the page footer going to pages such as 'Terms and Conditions', 'Testimonials', 'About Us' etc. These pages, therefore, have a very large number of links going to them compared with the most important pages on my site. Should I add 'nofollow' to these links?
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
Why doesn't SEOmoz see internal/external links on my site?
My SEOmoz analysis that my site contains neither external or internal lnks. I have used other tools and they have all seen the internal and external links on the pages. There aren't many but they are there. Why isn't SEOmoz seeing them?
Technical SEO | | iain0 -
Best Way to Handle - International Content - Different Language
Our site currently is focused in the USA and the entire site is in the English language. We have considered broadening our scope to include content from foreign countries - i.e. Brazil. What is the best way to approach this -- can we use our existing domain and just have a specific section of the site that is dedicated to a particular Country with content translated into that Country's predominant language? OR could this create SEO issues -- having a domain with both English and some other language? Would it be better to have this on a totally different domain with Country extension? This is totally foreign territory for me - bad pun intended. Any advice, help would be appreciated. Thanks. Matt
Technical SEO | | MWM37720 -
What are the best Free Press release sites to gain free links
Hi I am trying to find some good free press release sites that allow you to have a link with your press release to help drive traffic to your site but all the ones that i have found do not have links within them. The only ones i can find where you can have links in them are paid ones. Does anyone use press release sites to gain links to their sites and if so could you let me know which ones they are please and how important you feel they are.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
What should i do with the links for "Login", "Register", "My Trolley" links on every page.
My website ommrudraksha has 3 links on every page. 1. Login 2. Register 3. My trolley My doubt is i do not want to give any weightage to these links. does these links will be calculated when page links are calculated ? Should i remove these as links and place these as buttons ? ( with look a like of link visually ? )
Technical SEO | | Ommrudraksha0 -
Value of Twitter Links
Let's ignore the "social metric" value of Twitter links and mentions and look at it from the pure link juice point of view. Twitter accounts such as http://twitter.com/randfish used to have their own PageRank and were treated as separate URLs. Twitter changed that to http://twitter.com/#!/randfish consolidating all their content to a single URL. When I search for "randfish" in Google, however, the result is the first URL version. Some clarification on this matter would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Dan-Petrovic0