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I have a Wordpress site and I'm looking for a way to identify which pages in my site contain links to pages that generate 404 errors in GSC.

I tried the first solution in this SE post but found that "Full Referrer" only displays the source as direct, google, etc. It doesn't give me the URL of the page containing the bad link.

Is there a way to do this short of 3rd party software or did I miss a step in following the other post?

Edit: The 404 errors I'm finding are all generated by googlebot.

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    How do you see 404 errors in Google Analytics? That isn't a standard report. Most websites don't even put the GA tracking code on the 404 page. Even if you do, you have to create a custom report based on page title to find them. searchviu.com/en/404-errors-google-analytics
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Apr 11, 2019 at 18:41
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    bot traffic is automatically excluded anyways in google analytics, your best bet would be to see the server logs to check the referrers for the 404 page or use some online tool like error404.atomseo.com to find the dead links
    – Manoj Purohit
    Commented Apr 12, 2019 at 9:25

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You can find this report on Google Search Console, this will be the best option since Google bot scan whole your website and once it found a link to a page on your website that doesn't exist and return 404 error it will add it to the list. Click on one of the pages on the list and it will show you the referring page URL.

If you added your website already to Google Search console, a report with such errors usually should sent to your email by default.

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  • The report in GSC, gives the page/url it cannot find. That's where I'm starting from. However, it doesn't seem to give the referring URL.
    – Trebor
    Commented Apr 5, 2019 at 15:59
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    Google Search Console actually give the referring URL, when you press on the URL on the list, you will see the "Referring page".
    – Yossi Aharon
    Commented Apr 6, 2019 at 6:21
  • Tried this already. Let's make sure we're both doing the same thing. Using the new GSC, Index>Coverage>Excluded>Not Found (404)>Click on link in list below. Doesn't work for me, just gives me option to launch in new window or to inspect the URL.
    – Trebor
    Commented Apr 6, 2019 at 14:04
  • You select "Inspect URL" and it is listed on the inspection page as "Referring page"
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Apr 8, 2019 at 18:02
  • @StephenOstermiller, thanks, but even there it says "None Detected - URL might be known from other sources that are currently not reported". I was able to chase down the page through other means, but haven't found a consistent means of tracing these down.
    – Trebor
    Commented Apr 9, 2019 at 13:33
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You should be able to find all internal referral traffic in Google Analytics.

Go to Behavior, find your 404 Page, click on it and then set to show the full referred URL. You can add a filter for your own site to show internal vs. external links.

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  • can you please explain more about your answer ? i cant find this set to show the full referred URL
    – MisterR
    Commented May 26, 2020 at 13:31
  • In the secondary dimension you can select the full referrer or previous page to see where the 404 error is being referred from. It's also mentioned in some other comments on this thread.
    – keepkalm
    Commented Dec 18, 2020 at 6:11

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