Get a list of external URLs on my site

I’m not 100% sure this is the right area for this but it’s pretty general so here goes.

Let’s say I have a website that has 500 pages (I am inheriting this site from someone else). The previous person hard coded external links to a service that we use. What I’m tasked with is finding all of the places where that link exists. Other than going page by page, how do you find all of those links?

Please understand that this example is just to explain what I’m trying to accomplish, because the actual task is more complicated. Also, I can’t search the database, I can’t ask the vendor to place a redirect, anything like that.

Also, I have tried a half dozen services that will give me a list of external links that are on my website. But, so far, none of these services will tell me which pages those links are on. It’s just a list of external links (sometimes with a count of how many instances it found). This doesn’t seem like a hard thing to do. It also seems like exactly the kind of thing a computer can do in a fraction of a second that would take a human a very long time. And yet, I cannot figure out how to do it.

Any help is appreciated, thanks for reading.

Graham

Are the pages static, or are they created dynamically? If it’s the latter, then you may be able to search for the URL in your database.

You could try an online utility like http://freetools.webmasterworld.com/tools/internal-external/ to extract all URL’s

I would copy the files to my computer and then use either a text editor or an IDE to search the files. Save back up copies and be careful if you do any bulk string replaces.

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You can use tools like Xenu’s Link Sleuth (free) or Screaming Frog SEO Spider (paid).

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