3 replies to this topic

[Hex]

The agency my brother works with has recently identified that a lot of links point to his site from other sites but they point to pages that have since been removed and these are now shown as 404 errors if you follow them.

He was advised to put in a custom 404 error page witha link to the homepage to pass the value back there where possible and this makes sense, however, something else they did which I found really interesting is they provided a table that showed all of the incoming links pointint to dead pages which showed up as a 404. With this information they adviseed to look at each link 1 at a time and see where the most relivent plae for it to go to i. Does anyone know how they can have done this? What did they use to create such a useful report as I would like to run it on a couple of my sites whih I have changed around over the years.

[nuttakorn]

The agency my brother works with has recently identified that a lot of links point to his site from other sites but they point to pages that have since been removed and these are now shown as 404 errors if you follow them.

He was advised to put in a custom 404 error page witha link to the homepage to pass the value back there where possible and this makes sense, however, something else they did which I found really interesting is they provided a table that showed all of the incoming links pointint to dead pages which showed up as a 404. With this information they adviseed to look at each link 1 at a time and see where the most relivent plae for it to go to i. Does anyone know how they can have done this? What did they use to create such a useful report as I would like to run it on a couple of my sites whih I have changed around over the years.

This is one of Link building tactic, Link Reclamation. Firstly you identify the links which response as 404 or 302 and then you can use as 404 custom strategy or using the 301 to new pages that you will send the link juice value to new pages for maximizing the link value from existing links. You can use the tool like Open Site Explorer to identify.

Additionally , you can use this strategy to identify the anchor texts and optimize it as well.

[chrishirst]

They probably used Xenu's Link Sleuth ™

[Jill]

He was advised to put in a custom 404 error page witha link to the homepage to pass the value back there where possible and this makes sense

No, that doesn't make sense. A 404 error page doesn't get indexed by its very nature and therefore wouldn't pass any link popularity.

The no longer in existence URLs that are are being pointed to by other sites should be found and 301-redirected to their most appropriate counterpart--NOT 404'd.