Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Find all external 404 errors/links?
-
Hi All,
We have recently discovered a site was linking to our site but it was linking to an incorrect url, resulting in a 404 error. We had only found this by pure chance and wondered if there was a tool out there that will tell us when a site is linking to an incorrect url on our site?
Thanks
-
If you dont have access to the logs that could be an issue - not really any automated tools out there as it would need to crawl every website and find 404 errors.
I haven't tried this - so its just an idea. Go into GSC download all the links pointing to your site (and from places like Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic) and then chuck that list of urls into Screaming Frog or URL Profiler and look at external links and see if any are returning a 404. Not sure if this would work - its just an idea.
Thanks
Andy
-
Great, will take a look. Maybe run a trial to see if it does exactly what I need
Thanks for the info!
-
Good idea!
Although some of our clients that we do SEO for aren't hosting their websites on our server and we don't have access to their server logs etc.
Was hoping for an automated dashboard like MOZ/Screaming Frog/ or A hrefs as mentioned above. Due to the amount of clients we have, opening up and running through all there Log files could be time consuming.
Cheers for the info though, may come in use in the future, or to someone else reading this
-
Hi
The best way I have found is to look in your server logs, its the only true place to find out what Google is doing on your site.
Download the logs and look at all the 404 errors - quite simple and depending on size of your logs can take you around 5 minutes worth a work - the longer time period you can analyse in your logs the better.
Thanks
Andy
-
Hi David.
Ahrefs.com offers that service: broken links.
Another way to do that search could be this: Downloading the historic backlinks list and with a mass checker, check where do they point nowdays. I've used GScraper and its option to crawl outbound links.
Best Luck.
GR.
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
-
What do you do with product pages that are no longer used ? Delete/redirect to category/404 etc
We have a store with thousands of active items and thousands of sold items. Each product is unique so only one of each. All products are pinned and pushed online ... and then they sell and we have a product page for a sold item. All products are keyword researched and often can rank well for longtail keywords Would you :- 1. delete the page and let it 404 (we will get thousands) 2. See if the page has a decent PA, incoming links and traffic and if so redirect to a RELEVANT category page ? ~(again there will be thousands) 3. Re use the page for another product - for example a sold ruby ring gets replaces with ta new ruby ring and we use that same page /url for the new item. Gemma
Technical SEO | | acsilver0 -
Will deleting Wordpress tags result in 404 errors or anything?
I want to clean up my tags and I'm worried I'm going to look in my webmasters the next day with hundreds of errors. Whats the best way of doing this?
Technical SEO | | howlusa0 -
Find all links in the site and anchor text
Hi, Find all links in the site and anchor text and i need this done on my own website so i know if we dont have links that are anchored to numbers and punctuations that are not seen at all. Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Is there a way of changing the Permalink without getting the 404 Error?
Hi, I am new to this all.. Is there a way of changing the permalink for example from: domain/content/ to domain/profile/ without receiving the 404 error message. It's just that since my website has been developed, some pages and their content have changed but the permalink still shows the name of the old page which may be confusing. Ps. Please use most simple language for explanations as I am really new to it. Thank you! Ve
Technical SEO | | MissVe0 -
Self-referencing links
I personally think that self-referencing links are silly. It's blatantly easy for Google to tell and my instinct says that the link juice for this would simply evaporate rather than passing back to itself. Does anyone have information backing me up from an authoritative source? I can't find any info about this linked to Matt Cutts, Rand or any of those I look up to.
Technical SEO | | IPROdigital0 -
OK to block /js/ folder using robots.txt?
I know Matt Cutts suggestions we allow bots to crawl css and javascript folders (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNEipHjsEPU) But what if you have lots and lots of JS and you dont want to waste precious crawl resources? Also, as we update and improve the javascript on our site, we iterate the version number ?v=1.1... 1.2... 1.3... etc. And the legacy versions show up in Google Webmaster Tools as 404s. For example: http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global_functions.js?v=1.1
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.cookie.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global.js?v=1.2
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.validate.min.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/json2.js?v=1.1 Wouldn't it just be easier to prevent Googlebot from crawling the js folder altogether? Isn't that what robots.txt was made for? Just to be clear - we are NOT doing any sneaky redirects or other dodgy javascript hacks. We're just trying to power our content and UX elegantly with javascript. What do you guys say: Obey Matt? Or run the javascript gauntlet?0 -
404 errors on non-existent URLs
Hey guys and gals, First Moz Q&A for me and really looking forward to being part of the community. I hope as my first question this isn't a stupid one but I was just struggling to find any resource that dealt with the issue and am just looking for some general advice. Basically a client has raised a problem with 404 error pages - or the lack thereof- on non-existent URLs on their site; let's say for example: 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towels/asdfas' Obviously content never existed on this page so its not like you're saying 'hey, sorry this isn't here anymore'; its more like- 'there was never anything here in the first place'. Currently in this fictitious example typing in 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towels/asdfas**'** returns the same content as the 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towels' page which I appreciate isn't ideal. What I was wondering is how far do you take this issue- I've seen examples here on the seomoz site where you can edit the URI in a similar manner and it returns the same content as the parent page but with the alternate address. Should 404's be added across all folders on a site in a similar way? How often would this scenario be and issue particularly for internal pages two or three clicks down? I suppose unless someone linked to a page with a misspelled URL... Also would it be worth placing 301 redirects on a small number of common mis-spellings or typos e.g. 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towles' to the correct URLs as opposed to just 404s? Many thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | AJ2340 -
Does the Referral Traffic from a Link Influence the SEO Value of that Link?
If a link exists, and nobody clicks on it, could it still be valuable for SEO? Say I have 1000 links on 500 sites with Domain Authority ranging from 35 to 80. Let's pretend that 900 of those links generate referral traffic. Let's assume that the remaining 100 links are spread between 10 domains of the 500, but nobody ever clicks on them. Are they still valuable? Should an SEO seek to earn more links like those, even though they don't earn referral traffic? Does Google take referral data into account in evaluating links? 5343313-zelda-rogers-albums-zelda-pictures-duh-what-else-would-they-be-picture3672t-link-looks-so-lonely.jpg Sad%20little%20link.jpg
Technical SEO | | glennfriesen1
