How to find a specific link on my website (currently causing redirects)

[dreadmichael]

Hi everyone,

I've used crawlers like Xenu to find broken links before, and I love these tools. What I can't figure out is how to find specific pieces of code within my site. For example, Webmaster Tools tells me there are still links to old pages somewhere on my website but I just can't find them. Do you know of a crawler that can search for a specific link within the html?

Thanks in advance,

Josh

[sferrino]

There are a few ways I would approach this. In order:

1. Run a find in files using one of the text editors I use for coding, either UltraEdit or PhpEd, you can use whatever you are comfortable with,

2. Check the server logs for that page, it should show a referring page, which may not be on your site,

3. or just do a 301 from it to your home page or a relevant page. I have had situations where people link to the wrong page and I redirect them instead of letting it 404,

4. If you are sure it is an actual link on your site, and maybe it is being generated (you didn't post a link so I don't know which site you are referring to) , and not a redirect from somewhere, consider paying someone $5 on http://fiverr.com/ to find it.

[Thos003]

Dreamweaver has a way of searching an entire website if you download the site to Dreamweaver. But webmaster tools should tell you where the links are being found on your site. They typically tell you which URL has the bad links.

[dreadmichael]

Thanks for the reply.

I should have specified that the links are being reported in Bing webmaster tools and not Google webmaster tools. Bing doesn't seem to tell you where the bad links are.

[RyanKent]

Use the SEOmoz crawl report.

Let Roger loose on your site, then when the report is available, filter the excel file on the broken link field. Then check the "referrer" field for each broken link. The referrer field will show the page where the broken link was discovered.

You can then use the SEOmoz bar to highlight the links on a page. Sometimes a link isn't obvious as it is hidden. In those cases you can always right-click on the page and choose View Page Source from the options, then search for the link.