• majorAlexa

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI
          Moz Local

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
          Moz Pro

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

          Learn more
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
          Moz API

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. SEO Tactics
        3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
        4. Can we retrieve all 404 pages of my site?

        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.

        Can we retrieve all 404 pages of my site?

        Intermediate & Advanced SEO
        5
        11
        5166
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • mtthompsons
          mtthompsons last edited by

          Hi,

          Can we retrieve all 404 pages of my site?

          is there any syntax i can use in Google search to list just pages that give 404?

          Tool/Site that can scan all pages in Google Index and give me this report.

          Thanks

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • matbennett
            matbennett last edited by

            The 404s in webmaster tools relate to crawl errors. As such they will only appear if internally linked. It also limits the report to the top 1000 pages with errors only.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • Clickatell2
              Clickatell2 last edited by

              Set up a webmaster tools account for your site. You should be able to see all the 404 error urls.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • matbennett
                matbennett last edited by

                I wouldn't try to manually remove that number of URLs.  Mass individual removals can cause their own problems.

                If the pages are 404ing correctly, then they will be removed. However it is a slow process. For the number you are looking at it will mostly likely take months.  Google has to recrawl all of the URLs before it even knows that they are returning a 404 status.  It will then likely wait a while and do it again before removing then.  That's a painful truth and there really is not anything much you can do about it.

                It might (and this is very arguable) be worth ensuring that there is a crawl path to the 404 content. So maybe a link from a high authority page to a "recently removed content" list that contains links to a selection and keep replacing that list. This will help that content get recrawled more quickly, but it will also mean that you are linking to 404 pages which might send quality signal issues.  Something to weigh up.

                What would work more quickly is to mass remove in particular directories (if you are lucky enough that some of your content fits that pattern).  If you have a lot of urls in mysite.com/olddirectory and there is definitely nothing you want to keep in that directory  then you can lose big swathes of URLs in one hit - see here:  https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663427?hl=en

                Unfortunately that is only good for directories, not wildcards. However it's very helpful when it is an option.

                So, how to find those URLs?  (Your original question!!).

                Unfortunately there is no way to get them all back from google.  Even if you did a search for site:www.mysite.com and saved all of the results it will not return the number of results that you are looking for.

                I tend to do this by looking for patterns and removing those to find more patterns.  I'll try to explain:

                1. Search for site:www.yoursite.com
                2. Scroll down the list until you start seeing a pattern. (eg mysite.com/olddynamicpage-111.php , mysite.com/olddynamicpage-112.php , mysite.com/olddynamicpage-185.php  etc) .
                3. Note that pattern (return later to check that they all return a 404 )
                4. Now search again with that pattern removed, site:www.mysite.com -inurl:olddynamicpage
                5. Return to step 2

                Do this (a lot) and you start understanding the pattern that have been picked up.  There are usually a few that account for large number of the incorrectly indexed URLs. In the recent problem I did they were almost all relating to "faceted search gone wrong".

                Once you know the patterns you can check that the correct headers are being returned so that they start dropping out of the index. If any are directory patterns then you can remove than in big hits through GWMT.

                It's painful. It's slow, but it does work.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • mtthompsons
                  mtthompsons last edited by

                  Yes you need right at the same time to know which of the google indexed ones are 404

                  As google does not remove the dead 404 pages for months and was thinking to manually add them for removal in webmaster tools but need to find all of them that are indexed but 404

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • matbennett
                    matbennett last edited by

                    OK - that is a bit of a different problem (and a rather familiar one).  So the aim is to figure out what the 330 "phantom" pages are and then how to remove them?

                    Let me know if I have that right. If I have then I'll give you some tips based on me doing to same with a few million URLs recently.  I'll check first though, as it might get long!

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • mtthompsons
                      mtthompsons last edited by

                      Thanks you

                      I will try explaining my query again and you can correct me if the above is the solution again

                      1. My site has 70K pages

                      2. Google has indexed 500K pages from the site

                      Site:mysitename shows this

                      We have noindexed etc on most of them which is got down the counts to 300K

                      Now i want to find the pages that show 404 for our site checking the 300K pages

                      Webmaster shows few hundred as 404 but am sure there are many more

                      Can we scan the index rather then the site to find the ones Google search engine has indexed that are 404

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • matbennett
                        matbennett last edited by

                        As you say, on site crawlers such as Xenu & Screaming frog will only tell you when you are linking to 404 pages, not where people are linking to your 404 pages.

                        There are a few ways you can get to this data:

                        Your server logs : All 404 errors will be recorded on your server.  If someone links to a non-existent page and that link is ever followed by a single user or a crawler like google-bot, that will be recorded in your server log files.  You can access those directly (or pull 404s out of them on a regular, automatic basis).  Alternatively most hosting comes with some form of log analysis built in (awstats being one of the most common).  That will show you the 404 errors.

                        That isn't quite what you asked, as it doesn't mean that they have all been indexed, however that will be an exhaustive list that you can then check against.

                        Check that backlinks resolve : Download all of your backlinks (OSE, webmaster tools, ahreafs, majestic), look at the target and see what header is returned.  We use a custom build tools called linkwatchman to do this on an automatic regular basis. However as an occasional check you can download in to excel and use the excellent SEO Tools for excel to do this for free. ( http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/  <- best seo tool around)

                        Analytics : As long as your error pages trigger the google analytics tracking code you can get the data from here as well.  Most helpful when the page either triggers a custom variable, or uses a virtual url ( 404/requestedurl.html for instance).  Isolate the pages and look at where the traffic came from.

                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                        • Modi
                          Modi @mtthompsons last edited by

                          It will scan and list you all results, like 301 redirect, 200, 404 errors, 403 errors. However, screaming frog can spider upto 500 urls in there free product

                          If you have more, suggest to go with Xenu Link Sleuth. Download it, get your site crawled and get all pages including server error 404 to unlimited pages.

                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote -1
                          • mtthompsons
                            mtthompsons last edited by

                            Thanks but this would be scanning pages in my site. How will i find 404 pages that are indexed in Google?

                            Modi 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • TomRayner
                              TomRayner last edited by

                              Hey there

                              Screaming Frog is a great (and free!) tool that lets you do this.  You can download it here

                              Simply insert your URL and it will spider all of the URLs it can find for your site.  It will then serve up a ton of information about the page, including whether it is a 200, 404, 301 or so on.  You can even export this information into excel for easy filtering.

                              Hope this helps.

                              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote -1
                              • 1 / 1
                              • First post
                                Last post

                              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.

                              • See all categories

                              Related Questions

                              • BandG

                                Crawl Stats Decline After Site Launch (Pages Crawled Per Day, KB Downloaded Per Day)

                                Hi all, I have been looking into this for about a month and haven't been able to figure out what is going on with this situation. We recently did a website re-design and moved from a separate mobile site to responsive. After the launch, I immediately noticed a decline in pages crawled per day and KB downloaded per day in the crawl stats. I expected the opposite to happen as I figured Google would be crawling more pages for a while to figure out the new site. There was also an increase in time spent downloading a page. This has went back down but the pages crawled has never went back up. Some notes about the re-design: URLs did not change Mobile URLs were redirected Images were moved from a subdomain (images.sitename.com) to Amazon S3 Had an immediate decline in both organic and paid traffic (roughly 20-30% for each channel) I have not been able to find any glaring issues in search console as indexation looks good, no spike in 404s, or mobile usability issues. Just wondering if anyone has an idea or insight into what caused the drop in pages crawled? Here is the robots.txt and attaching a photo of the crawl stats. User-agent: ShopWiki Disallow: / User-agent: deepcrawl Disallow: / User-agent: Speedy Disallow: / User-agent: SLI_Systems_Indexer Disallow: / User-agent: Yandex Disallow: / User-agent: MJ12bot Disallow: / User-agent: BrightEdge Crawler/1.0 ([email protected]) Disallow: / User-agent: * Crawl-delay: 5 Disallow: /cart/ Disallow: /compare/ ```[fSAOL0](https://ibb.co/fSAOL0)

                                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BandG
                                0
                              • Ben-R

                                E-Commerce Site Collection Pages Not Being Indexed

                                Hello Everyone, So this is not really my strong suit but I’m going to do my best to explain the full scope of the issue and really hope someone has any insight. We have an e-commerce client (can't really share the domain) that uses Shopify; they have a large number of products categorized by Collections. The issue is when we do a site:search of our Collection Pages (site:Domain.com/Collections/) they don’t seem to be indexed. Also, not sure if it’s relevant but we also recently did an over-hall of our design. Because we haven’t been able to identify the issue here’s everything we know/have done so far: Moz Crawl Check and the Collection Pages came up. Checked Organic Landing Page Analytics (source/medium: Google) and the pages are getting traffic. Submitted the pages to Google Search Console. The URLs are listed on the sitemap.xml but when we tried to submit the Collections sitemap.xml to Google Search Console 99 were submitted but nothing came back as being indexed (like our other pages and products). We tested the URL in GSC’s robots.txt tester and it came up as being “allowed” but just in case below is the language used in our robots:
                                User-agent: *
                                Disallow: /admin
                                Disallow: /cart
                                Disallow: /orders
                                Disallow: /checkout
                                Disallow: /9545580/checkouts
                                Disallow: /carts
                                Disallow: /account
                                Disallow: /collections/+
                                Disallow: /collections/%2B
                                Disallow: /collections/%2b
                                Disallow: /blogs/+
                                Disallow: /blogs/%2B
                                Disallow: /blogs/%2b
                                Disallow: /design_theme_id
                                Disallow: /preview_theme_id
                                Disallow: /preview_script_id
                                Disallow: /apple-app-site-association
                                Sitemap: https://domain.com/sitemap.xml A Google Cache:Search currently shows a collections/all page we have up that lists all of our products. Please let us know if there’s any other details we could provide that might help. Any insight or suggestions would be very much appreciated. Looking forward to hearing all of your thoughts! Thank you in advance. Best,

                                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ben-R
                                0
                              • jnew929

                                Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not linked to anywhere on your site?

                                Hi, We had a content manager request to delete a page from our site. Looking at the traffic to the page, I noticed there were a lot of inbound links from credible sites. Rather than deleting the page, we simply removed it from the navigation, so that a user could still access the page by clicking on a link to it from an external site. Questions: Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not directly accessible from your site? If no: do we keep this page in our Sitemap, or remove it? If yes: what is a better strategy to ensure the inbound links aren't considered "broken links" and also to minimize any negative impact to our SEO? Should we delete the page and 301 redirect users to the parent page for the page we had previously hidden?

                                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jnew929
                                0
                              • Malika1

                                If Robots.txt have blocked an Image (Image URL) but the other page which can be indexed has this image, how is the image treated?

                                Hi MOZers, This probably is a dumb question but I have a case where the robots.tags has an image url blocked but this image is used on a page (lets call it Page A) which can be indexed. If the image on Page A has an Alt tags, then how is this information digested by crawlers? A) would Google totally ignore the image and the ALT tags information? OR B) Google would consider the ALT tags information? I am asking this because all the images on the website are blocked by robots.txt at the moment but I would really like website crawlers to crawl the alt tags information. Chances are that I will ask the webmaster to allow indexing of images too but I would like to understand what's happening currently. Looking forward to all your responses 🙂 Malika

                                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika1
                                1
                              • BeckyKey

                                Ecommerce Site - Duplicate product descriptions & SKU pages

                                Hi I have a couple of questions regarding the best way to optimise SKU pages on a large ecommerce site. At the moment we have 2 landing pages per product - one is the primary landing page with no SKU, the other includes the SKU in the URL so our sales people & customers can find it when using the search facility on the site. The SKU landing page has a canonical pointing to the primary page as they're duplicates. Is this the best way? Or is it better to have the one page with the SKU in the URL? Also, we have loads of products with the very similar product descriptions, I am working on trying to include a unique paragraph or few sentences on these to improve the content - how dangerous is the duplicate content within your own site? I know its best to have totally unique content, but it won't be possible on a site with thousands of products and a small team. At the moment I am trying to prioritise the products to update. Thank you 🙂

                                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey
                                0
                              • BrandBuilder

                                New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?

                                We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.

                                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder
                                0
                              • M_D_Golden_Peak

                                Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?

                                Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this. When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost? We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name). Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!

                                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak
                                0
                              • Alex-Harford

                                Do 404 pages pass link juice? And best practices...

                                Last year Google said bad links to 404 pages wouldn't hurt your site. Could that still be the case in light of recent Google updates to try and combat spammy links and negative SEO? Can links to 404 pages benefit a website and pass link juice? I'd assume at the very least that any link juice will pass through links FROM the 404 page? Many websites have great 404 pages that get linked to: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fretardzone.com%2F404 - that was the first of four I checked from the "60 Really Cool...404 Pages" that actually returned the 404 HTTP Status! So apologies if you find the word 'retard' offensive. According to Open Site Explorer it has a decent Page Authority and number of backlinks - but it doesn't show in Google's SERPs. I'd never do it, but if you have a particularly well-linked to 404 page, is there an argument for giving it 200 OK Status? Finally, what are the best practices regarding 404s and address bar links? For example, if
                                www.examplesite.com/3rwdfs returns a 404 error, should I make that redirect to
                                www.examplesite.com/404 or leave it as is? Redirecting to www.examplesite.com/404 might not be user-friendly as people won't be able to correct the URL in the address bar. But if I have a great  404 page that people link to, I don't want links going to loads of random pages do I? Is either way considered best practice? If I did a 301 redirect I guess it would send the wrong signal to the crawlers? Should I use a 302 redirect, or even a 304 Not Modified redirect?

                                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford
                                1

                              Get started with Moz Pro!

                              Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                              Start my free trial
                              Products
                              • Moz Pro
                              • Moz Local
                              • Moz API
                              • Moz Data
                              • STAT
                              • Product Updates
                              Moz Solutions
                              • SMB Solutions
                              • Agency Solutions
                              • Enterprise Solutions
                              • Digital Marketers
                              Free SEO Tools
                              • Domain Authority Checker
                              • Link Explorer
                              • Keyword Explorer
                              • Competitive Research
                              • Brand Authority Checker
                              • Local Citation Checker
                              • MozBar Extension
                              • MozCast
                              Resources
                              • Blog
                              • SEO Learning Center
                              • Help Hub
                              • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                              • How-to Guides
                              • Moz Academy
                              • API Docs
                              About Moz
                              • About
                              • Team
                              • Careers
                              • Contact
                              Why Moz
                              • Case Studies
                              • Testimonials
                              Get Involved
                              • Become an Affiliate
                              • MozCon
                              • Webinars
                              • Practical Marketer Series
                              • MozPod
                              Connect with us

                              Contact the Help team

                              Join our newsletter
                              Moz logo
                              © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                              • Accessibility
                              • Terms of Use
                              • Privacy

                              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.