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.
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
-
Sudden Indexation of "Index of /wp-content/uploads/"
Hi all, I have suddenly noticed a massive jump in indexed pages. After performing a "site:" search, it was revealed that the sudden jump was due to the indexation of many pages beginning with the serp title "Index of /wp-content/uploads/" for many uploaded pieces of content & plugins. This has appeared approximately one month after switching to https. I have also noticed a decline in Bing rankings. Does anyone know what is causing/how to fix this? To be clear, these pages are **not **normal /wp-content/uploads/ but rather "index of" pages, being included in Google. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
404 errors
Hi I am getting these show up in WMT crawl error any help would be very much appreciated | ?escaped_fragment=Meditation-find-peace-within/csso/55991bd90cf2efdf74ec3f60 | 404 | 12/5/15 |
Technical SEO | | ReSEOlve
| | 2 | mobile/?escaped_fragment= | 404 | 10/26/15 |
| | 3 | ?escaped_fragment=Tips-for-a-balanced-lifestyle/csso/1 | 404 | 12/1/15 |
| | 4 | ?escaped_fragment=My-favorite-yoga-spot/csso/5598e2130cf2585ebcde3b9a | 404 | 12/1/15 |
| | 5 | ?escaped_fragment=blog/c19s6 | 404 | 11/29/15 |
| | 6 | ?escaped_fragment=blog/c19s6/Tag/yoga | 404 | 11/30/15 |
| | 7 | ?escaped_fragment=Inhale-exhale-and-once-again/csso/2 | 404 | 11/27/15 |
| | 8 | ?escaped_fragment=classes/covl | 404 | 10/29/15 |
| | 9 | m/?escaped_fragment= | 404 | 10/26/15 |
| | 10 | ?escaped_fragment=blog/c19s6/Page/1 | 404 | 11/30/15 | | Â |0 -
:443 - 404 error
I get strange :443 errors in my 404 monitor on Wordpress https://www.compleetverkleed.nl:443/hoed-al-capone-panter-8713647758068-2/
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO
https://www.compleetverkleed.nl:443/cart/www.compleetverkleed.nl/feestkleding
https://www.compleetverkleed.nl:443/maskers/ I have no idea where these come from :S2 -
How big is the problem: 404-errors as result of out of stock products?
We had a discussion about the importance of 404-errors as result of products which are out of stock. Of course this is not good, but what is the leverance in terms of importance: low-medium-high?
Technical SEO | | Digital-DMG0 -
Backlinks that we have if they are 404?
Hi All, Backlinks that we have if they are 404? Open site explorer shows 1,000 of links and when I check many are 404 and those are spammy links which we had but now the sites are 404 I am doing a link profile check which is cleaning up all spammy links Should i take any action on them? As open site explorer or Google still shows these links on the searches. Should we mention these URL's in disallow in Google webmaster. Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Double Slash // in URL
My client is using double forward slahes in URL like this "//" is this affecting SEO?
Technical SEO | | yanaiguana1110 -
Error: Missing Meta Description Tag on pages I can't find in order to correct
This seems silly, but I have errors on blog URLs in our WordPress site that I don't know how to access because they are not in our Dashboard. We are using All in One SEO. The errors are for blog archive dates, authors and just simply 'blog'. Here are samples: http://www.fateyes.com/2012/10/
Technical SEO | | gfiedel
http://www.fateyes.com/author/gina-fiedel/
http://www.fateyes.com/blog/ Does anyone know how to input descriptions for pages like these?
Thanks!!0 -
Should there be a canonical tag on my 404 error page?
In my crawl diagnostics, I notice some 4xx client errors. They are appearing for pages that no longer exist, so I'm not sure what the problem is. Shouldn't they just be dealt as 404's? Anyway, on closer inspection I noticed that my 404 error page contains a canonical tag which points to the missing page. Could this be the issue? Is it a good idea to remove the canonical tag from this error page? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Leighm0