Hi, Ive just rebuilt a client’s site. All the page names have changed (they are now user/seo friendly). There are lots of websites linking to the old pages. How can I view what websites are linking to these old pages so that I can contact them and change the backlinks to link to a valid web page instead?
thanks
Behold, the magic of Google Webmaster Tools. Eventually, Google will find your 404s and list them in the crawl errors section on the dashboard. If you don’t want to, or can’t, contact the linking website, you can always create some 301 redirects in your .htaccess file.
thanks for the fast response hooperman. I thought that Webmaster Tools was the answer, but I looked in there and see lots of crawl errors (Unreachable and Not Found). However, that only shows internal dead links (that is, Google must still have the old version cached and its following the links to the old pages which are no longer there). There is nowhere that lists external sites linking to dead pages on my site.
There is the ‘Links to your site’ section on the dashboard, however this doesnt show which sites are linking to dead pages.
I dont think Im looking in the wrong place - Ive been all over Webmaster Tools looking for the answer. Am I missing something?
thanks
I agree to bolton
Thanks for the support - now I know its not me just being stupid!
In Webmaster Tools look for the ‘Crawl Errors’ > ‘Not Found’ section.
You’ll see the list of URL’s Google couldn’t find (giving a 404). The second column in that list shows “Linked From” where the pages that are linking to the 404 pages are provided (normally as a link themselves).
More info here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/10/webmaster-tools-shows-crawl-error.html
As seriocomic says, you can find what pages are linking to the 404s if you drill down. I wrote something here about repairing 404s, if that’s any help. Scan the page for “Prioritising Content Creation” and you’ll see a description of how to identify and prioritise those missing pages.