📘 This article explains how to use Botify reports to locate pages linking to other pages that return HTTP errors.
Overview
You must remove all sources to completely remove error pages from your website, which includes links to these error pages (links from Page B) and redirects to these error pages (Page C).
Creating the Report
To identify redirects to error pages, create a SiteCrawler URL Explorer report to show the pages that returned HTTP error codes to Botify's crawler and the redirected pages.
Navigate to the SiteCrawler > HTTP Codes report.
Click the 4xx URLs KPI at the top of the page to first identify the pages that returned HTTP 4xx error codes in Botify's crawl:
Add a filter to include server errors: HTTP Status Code between 500 and 599. Click the AND operator to change it to OR:
Click the Add Filter Group link to add a filter to select only error pages with incoming redirects: "Redirected From URLs exists". Using a filter group enables you to group the previous filter with an AND operator, so the report includes only pages that returned 4xx or 5xx status codes and have redirects.
Add the following columns to the report: Redirected From URLs and No. of Unique Inlinks.
The Redirected From URLs column lists URLs that redirect to the error page (Page C in the image at the top of this article), and the No. of Unique Inlinks column shows how many pages link to the error page (Page B). Some error pages may have both sources, with links and redirects, while others may only be found through redirects.
The No. of Unique Inlinks column provides a global view of how the error pages are discovered on the website. Click the column header to see pages with the lowest number of incoming links first, identifying whether error pages are only found through redirects.
Now that you have identified where these redirect pages are linked from (Redirected from URLs), choose one of the following actions to address the redirects:
If another page is the correct target for the redirect instead of the error page (URL Card column), then remove the redirect. You should also consider correcting the redirect rules on your website since external links to the "Redirected From URLs" will also lead to errors.
If there is no other page that should be targeted, remove the error links, just as you would do for 404 pages, except that here the link is not direct: it is the link to the redirected pages that you need to remove (links to Page C). You should also consider removing or updating the redirect rule (the Redirected From URLs should probably return the error). It may be that the redirect rule that applies is too large.