How to find links to 404 pages?

[MarloSchneider]

I know that I used to be able to do this, but I can't seem to remember.

One of the sites I am working on has had a lot of pages moving around lately.  I am sure some links got lost in the fray that I would like to recover, what is the easiest way to see links going to a domain that are pointing to 404 pages?

[gfiorelli1]

You can use Open Site Explorer, but i suggest you to widen the discovery using also Yahoo! SiteExplorer

[goodnewscowboy]

Hi Spencer:

I don't know if this qualifies as the easiest way , but it ranks right up there:

Virante's Recovery Tool

[petrakraft]

Did you look into the Google Webmaster Tools already? There you can see them as well - of course not all. But you have to check from time to time - they don't show up all together. If you fix some perpaps some more will come up ...

[ninjamarketer]

Hello Spencer,

I recommend two tools

1. Xenu link sleuth (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html#Download)

2. Gsitecrawler ( http://gsitecrawler.com/en/download/)

Both will report all the linked pages throwing a 404 error and other status codes including "forbidden request", "no connection", "no such host" and more.

Hope this helps.

Sameer

[MarloSchneider]

As familiar as I am with Yahoo SiteExplorer I have never used it to find external links that go to pages that are no longer there.  How can I do this with that tool?

[gfiorelli1]

Sorry for the delay in my answer.

When you have detected all the 404 of your website, you can use the "Explore URL" search in Siteexplorer. If are still existing backlinks to those pages, Yahoo Siteexplorer will show them.

To be sure I just did a try with an 404 of a new client of mine, and just discovered that one 404 page was linked by a Yale University page... obviously I've just made an 301

[jennita]

Specifically in Open Site Explorer, check out the "Top Pages" tab to see if any of your top linked to pages are returning a 404. This tab is actually the first one I look at when running analysis of a site.

[fourthdimensioninc]

where is that little button next to my crawl warnings that lets me open urls, or explore links to that url using OSE?