Response Codes: External Client Error (4XX)

External URLs with a client-side error.

This indicates a problem occurred with the URL request and can include responses such as 400 bad request, 403 Forbidden, 404 Page Not Found, 410 Removed, 429 Too Many Requests and more.

A 404 ‘Page Not Found’ is the most common, and often referred to as a broken link.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

Use the ‘Response Codes’ tab and ‘External’ and ‘Client Error (4xx)’ filters to view these URLs.

View URLs that link to errors using the lower ‘Inlinks’ tab and export them in bulk via ‘Bulk Export > Response Codes > External > Client Error (4xx) Inlinks’.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when an external URL responds with a client-side error (4xx response code), such as a 404 ‘Page Not Found’.

For example:

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 216


How To Fix

All links on a website should ideally resolve to 200 ‘OK’ URLs.

Errors such as 404 broken links should be updated so users are taken to the correct URL, or removed.

A 403 forbidden error is also common on the web today and occurs when a web server denies access to the SEO Spider’s request. This isn’t usually an issue for users if accessible in a browser, and can be ignored.

A 403 error can often be resolved by switching the user-agent to Chrome via ‘Config > User-Agent’ and crawling again.

Please read our FAQs on each of the other following common responses:

• 400 Bad Request
• 403 Forbidden
• 406 Not Acceptable
• 429 Too Many Requests