HubSpot Ideas

Paul_FNKE

Overall 404-check

We just transferred our site to Hubspot and I wanted to check on 404's. I used brokenlinkcheck.com but that doesn't work well with Hubspot. 

 

To check for 404's I now have to manually check every page and blogpost from our previous site. That's one **bleep** of a job with some 150 pages and blogs. 

 

Idea: It would be great to have the option to check on 404/broken links for the entire site, in one place. Just like brokenlinkcheck.com does. 

21 Replies
shatton
Participant

 Yes. Please fix this. On our old company website (Joomla), all I had to do was go to the 404 error section, see all the urls that people tried to go to, type in what URLs anyone going to that should redirect to, and taking care of all future 404 errors was a 3 second job. Super easy. There are neat Wordpress plugins that do this too.

DG_TP
Participant

This feature would be incredibly helpful.

leslieb
Participant

This would be super helpful for those who are migrating websites with lots of content already built out. We are running into a similar problem right now and this would be incredibly useful! 

You get myupvote!

shatton
Participant

This is my biggest regret for migrating my site to Hubspot... the lack of this feature. 😞

lpleva
HubSpot Product Team

Hi folks,

We are actively reviewing how to implement this type of functionality, as we agree it would be quite useful. As soon as more information is available, I'll be sure to share it. 

Cheers,

Lukas

garrettdigital
Member

I agree. It's pretty difficult for a non-tech marketing person to find these issues if they have to use a third-party crawler software. This would be an excellent addition. 

Kasimir7
HubSpot Employee

Hi people,

I came across this article that shows how to find broken links in HubSpot.
I hope this helps.


Cheers,
Kasimir

garrettdigital
Member

Thanks for your response. Using the method you describe doesn't solve this issue, because you'd need to go into each page one-by-one to discover your broken links. As a maintenance task, it's a good idea to regularly check and fix your internal broken links and a broken link report would be a useful feature to make this efficient. 

shatton
Participant

@Kasimir7 @garrettdigital Also read the article .. that gets me a tiny bit closer. But I agree. I should have a single place that has all these. I would even like to be alerted by email when my website has a broken link. Nothing more frustrating than running a google or facebook campaign down a funnel that you didn't know had a broken link until a prospect or client points it out. 😕

shatton
Participant

@Kasimir7 were you able to get this to work? My pages look like this2020-05-14_14h41_17.png

Kasimir7
HubSpot Employee

@shatton, usually it takes some time for it find the links. 
I would refresh it in 24 hours again (see yellow banner in your screenshot).
I agree it would be great to have such a functionality for all pages, however it is one step closer to what we are looking for. 🙂

KLeVoyer
Member

Hi there, I'd like to pile on my vote for this functionality. Is there any update? Thank you!

karineyrendahl
Participant

I fully support you in this. Having to go to each page is very time consuming and I find that I have very little overview of my page.

GenoFAB
Participant

I am not sure that HS needs to have a competitive link checker. Even on other platforms like WP that have link checking tools available, this can really take a toll on the server. It's generally better to use a third-party application. We use SEMRush site audit feature with some level of success. The main issue we are running into is a problem with broken URLs in blog listing pages.

tomfoutsitzis
HubSpot Employee

To find a list 404 errors you should use tools like Google Search Console (free, hopefully this is already set up for your site) or Screaming Frog (crawl 500 pages free).

michiriu
Member

I think people in this thread may be asking for two different things:

 

1) a tool to check find broken links on a Hubspot site.  Tom's suggestion would work, though people above have commented that an integrated solution would be more user friendly.

 

2) a tool to identify inbound links that are missing, for example, shatton's comment above:

 

"On our old company website (Joomla), all I had to do was go to the 404 error section, see all the urls that people tried to go to, type in what URLs anyone going to that should redirect to, and taking care of all future 404 errors was a 3 second job."

 

I'm more interested in the second ask, and would like to know how to get this information out of Hubspot. We migrated to Hubspot from WP and I don't know what links may still exist on the Internet to the old WP site with dated content we removed and apparently didn't redirect properly, creating a bad experience for website visitors.  If there's a way to do this with a third party tool, please let me know; haven't seen anything in this area in GSC or Screaming Frog (maybe I am missing something)?

lpleva
HubSpot Product Team

Hi everyone!

 

I am excited to share that we're currently enhancing our SEO Recommendations tool to check for broken links. For now, our focus is on detecting broken outgoing internal and external links. Eventually, we'd also like to explore checking for broken inbound links, but that's not part of this initial work. 

 

If you're interested in getting early access to the functionality as soon as it's available, please reach out to @a_schumacher with your name, company email address, and the ID of a portal that has CMS Hub Professional/Enterprise or Marketing Hub Professional/Enterprise. 

 

Best,

Lukas

shatton
Participant

@lpleva I am glad that you are making progress on this, but I'm a bit sad that I still cannot pull up a 404 report. BUT

 

.. Good news for everyone else:

 

Frustrated about the news that the 404 report is still not created, I went into Google Analytics (for the umteenth time) to see what I could find and low and behold, Hubspot doesn't put a title on the 404 page when someone hits it. Instead it comes up as "(not set)". This means that with Google Analytics, you can find all the 404 errors over a period of time.

 

Take a look at what I found in the past 7 days:

 

In Google Analytics, go to Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages.

Select Primary Dimention: Page Title.

Sort the first column "Page Title" by A-Z

At the VERY top you will see "(not set)". Click that open.
EURIEKA!

Screenshot_1.pngScreenshot_2.png

 

michiriu
Member

@shatton - pure genius!!  I love it -- thanks!!

a_schumacher
HubSpot Product Team

Hi all! My team now has a beta available for a recommendation within our SEO Recommendations Home tool that will identify broken internal links on your pages for the domain(s) that we scan. The scope of this initial beta will be listing broken internal links (links with the same domain as the domain that you scanned in the tool), but we do want to add a check for broken external links in the next few months. 

If you are interested in getting beta access to the broken internal links optimization for SEO recommendations home, send me a private message with your name, HubSpot portal ID for a portal with Marketing Hub Pro+ or CMS Pro+, and your email address! If you have already messaged me- sit tight! I have your information and I will be reaching out to you today.