How to find internal pages linking to a URL?

[renegadeempire]

Hey, I had an issue where a client found a bad link on their site then I went to fix it and couldn't figure out where on earth it was. I tried using different software which would find the link, but not tell me where it was linked from. I asked for some help from someone in my office and they found it in about 15 seconds. Their strategy was "think like a client - just click everywhere".

Is there a way to quickly find what URLs are pointing to a specific URL?

Cheers

[CleverPhD]

Use a tool like the Screaming Frog SEO Spider.  It will show you the link and all the page(s) it is on.  If you find nothing, you have a spreadsheet showing that the link is not present.  Remind the client that next time if they can possibly get a screen shot that would really help.

[renegadeempire]

Cheers CleverPhD, I used Screaming Frog but couldn't see where it shows this. On checking again I see there is a tab at the very bottom called "In Links" which shows all the links pointing to the select URL. Awesome!

[KeriMorgret]

And here's a post that talks about Screaming Frog and Xenu and some of the wonderful things they can help you with, for future reference. http://moz.com/blog/crawler-faceoff-xenu-vs-screaming-frog

[renegadeempire]

Sweet, cheers! Definitely worth a read, I don't really know the power of these two other than checking for 404s.

[CleverPhD]

Ah yes - it is easy to miss where that tab is - glad you found it!

[Koolaburra]

Is there really no way to find this within Moz's tools? If I'm looking at a 404 or a duplicate page, I should be able to track back to the page(s) that the link is coming from.

--Jeff

[KeriMorgret]

If you download the CSV report, it should list the referring URL.