Find all external 404 errors/links?

[O2C]

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

[GastonRiera]

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.

[Andy-Halliday]

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

[O2C]

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

[O2C]

Great, will take a look. Maybe run a trial to see if it does exactly what I need

Thanks for the info!

[Andy-Halliday]

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