Missing 301 redirects

[muzzmoz]

I just had a developer friend call me in a panic, because they had gone live with a new site and found out (the hard way) that they had missed some pages on their 301 redirects. So the pages are appearing in Google but serving 404s. Ouch!

So their question was: other than running a report for 404 errors in something like Screaming Frog, is there a way to hunt down ONLY pages serving 404s, then export to CSV so they can be redirected?

Anyone got any tricks up their sleeve?

[TheSymmetran]

Not that I know of, running a live crawl of the site is the only way, tool-agnostic.

How large of a mess is this, how many missing 301s? how many pages in total? Just curious.

[seanginnaw]

Hi there,

I would check your server logs for pages that have been serving up 404 errors when accessed via Google Search.

You can then add in the necessary 301s for these and you'll be good as new!

Alternatively, if you want a catch-all approach, you can use screaming frog to identify the 404 pages on the site. If you have a URL export from your old site, run these URLs through using the 'upload list' function on screaming frog to check their response codes individually.

All the best,

Sean

[muzzmoz]

Don't know. That's the problem. The dev doesn't actually know how many pages she might have missed. She's looking for a way to identify exactly how many there are and what they are.

[muzzmoz]

Thanks Sean,

It's a Shopify site, so I don't think the dev has access to server logs.

I think the alternative approach might work though. I'm not sure if they have a URL export, but if they do I'll suggest they use the list function.

Thx again.