Can we retrieve all 404 pages of my site?

[TomRayner]

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.

[mtthompsons]

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

[Modi]

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.

[matbennett]

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.

[mtthompsons]

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

[matbennett]

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!

[mtthompsons]

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

[matbennett]

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.

[Clickatell2]

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

[matbennett]

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.