Best Tool for Finding Backlinks Pointing to 404 Pages on Your Website?

[vetofunk]

Hi,

Anyone have any recommended tools for finding backlinks pointing to your website that are going to 404 pages? Couldn't find anything in MOZ.

Thanks!

[JackSaville]

Hi there,

Here you go https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker using Ahrefs you can identify your broken backlinks, so you can reach out to fix them.

thanks

[brooksmanley]

The tool I use most often is Moz's Open Site Explorer:

Link Opportunities > Reclaim Links > will show you all backlinks that go to any page with any type of error code.

[Linda-Vassily]

I like to use Google Search Console (aka Webmaster Tools). If you go to Crawl > Crawl Errors and look at the Not found tab you'll see the pages that couldn't be found, either linked from within your site or from external sites.

(For now—for me at least—I need to use the old version of Search Console as the new one doesn't have this report.)

[vetofunk]

I see that it shows your site's pages that have inbound links going to them and are 404 for example. I don't see where it lists the outside URL's pointing to error pages though. Am I missing something?

[brooksmanley]

Ah I gotcha. Yeah I personally don't know of any tools that let you know the URL of the linking page.

But I would imagine with a page linking to a 404 error, you would first want to correct the issue or create a redirect. But I can also see why you would be interested in knowing where the link is coming from.

[Linda-Vassily]

Google Search Console tells you the URL of the linking page.

[brooksmanley]

Within crawl errors? I didn't think it did.

[Linda-Vassily]

Yup, just click on the error URL in the list and you get a popup window with two tabs—Error details and Linked from.

[epropstcsky]

Screaming Frog (the free, unlicensed version, even) does a really nice job of finding both internal and external links resulting in 404, run a crawl of your site and check the response codes tab, sort by code column to find all 404s, if any. You can see the domain in this view so it's easy to sort out which are coming from inside your house, and which aren't.

[MhuhammadAzadAliShah]

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