Tools You Can Use to Find 404 Errors

Ryte Bot

This is a great tool that can be used to identify 404 errors on a website. To identify an error in a website, simply hit the Website Success tab and select "indexability" → "status codes", and then click on the 4xx status codes.

You can get an in-depth detail of the problem (if you wish) by analyzing those pages that are linked to all the inaccessible URLs. To carry out this function, click on "links" and select "overview" → "list of all links". Then set up the necessary filters by choosing the "Add new filters" option.

The filter will link all the links that are pointing to the internal pages. If you want to restrict the results to only the inaccessible pages, simply click on "Add new filters", select Status Code (source), and then select "is" "404". Doing this will limit the result only where 404 errors occur.

Once both filters have been successfully created and applied, it will display a full list of all the internal 404 errors together with the pages that they are linked to.

Note that, if you have linked the Ryte bot together with Google Analytics, it will also analyze URLs from Google Analytics. With this, you stand a chance to identify all the 404 error Pages.

It also gives you the statistics of the total number of visitors that have access to those URLs in the past 30 days. With this information, you can prioritize the 404 errors to be corrected first, mainly based on their traffic.

Google Search Console (GSC)

This is another tool for identifying 404 errors in a website. The Google search console tool has lots of useful and valuable information about your domain. A simple click on "index" → "coverage" will bring up a list of problems that were found by Google bot when crawling. You can click on an issue to open a list that shows all the affected URLs.

Google search console usually lists all the 404 pages that were detected on a website, both old and new errors. So, if you want to analyze the 404 page errors, first check the individual date of a page to see if it is still in existence.

Note that some data are generated by making a comparison with the URLs that are stored in the sitemap.xml. This implies that both the 404 errors that have been corrected and the URLs that no longer exist in the Google search index are present here.

Most of the time, 404 errors suddenly appear in the list even though they have already been fixed. This is due to the fact that Google crawlers access each website multiple times.