Open Site Explorer - Finding 404s from my competitor's external linking Root Domains

[Francisco_Meza]

I want to find websites that have linked 404s to my competitors. My goal is to contact webmasters who have linked to my competitors with 404s, but I cannot figure out how to get Open Site Explorer to give me that data.

I can easily see this in GWT for my own site, but I need this for my competition instead.

Does anybody know a quick way to get this information?

[EppieVojt]

Depending on how large the OSE list is, you can run it through a free bulk status checker like this one: http://www.seoautomatic.com/unique-tools/bulk-url-checker/

That will return the status codes of the urls you drop in but it only accepts 50 rows per batch.  You could easily create a similar tool using a scraper that would accommodate more URLs per run -- using PHP you'd just have to use the curl function to pull in the pages being linked to, then use curl_getinfo($curl_handle,CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE); to grab the response code.  If it's a 404, you write that entry to an export file.

Hope that helps!

Eppie

[KeriMorgret]

You could also look to Blekko or now Bing for some of that link data, in addition to SEOmoz, and run it through a status checker like Eppie described.