# Bulk 404 Check: Archived Pages That Now 404

Enter your domain. The tool lists the pages the Wayback Machine has archived for
it, checks which of them now return 404, and links the last archived copy of
each. It is free and needs no account.

Use the tool: https://seobandwagon.com/tools/wayback-checker

## Why look for lost pages?

A page that once answered and now returns 404 sends everyone who still has its
address to an error page: visitors with a bookmark, sites that link to it, and
search engines that remember it. Pages go missing in redesigns, migrations and
clean-ups, and nobody lists what was lost. The Wayback Machine does keep a list
of what your site once had, which is what this tool starts from.

## What the tool does

1. Reads the pages the Wayback Machine's index holds for your domain: HTML pages
   that answered with a 200 when they were archived.
2. Asks your live site about each one with a HEAD request, and confirms any 404
   or 410 with a GET before it counts.
3. Lists the pages that now return 404 or 410, each with a link to the last copy
   the Wayback Machine holds, so you can see what was there. The results download
   as a CSV.

## What it checks and what it leaves out

- Up to 50 pages per run, the ones nearest the top of the site first. When the
  Wayback Machine holds more, the page says how many it found.
- It leaves out the home page, addresses with a query string, and site machinery
  such as admin, login, feeds and the REST API.
- It reads only the status your site answers. A page that answers 200 with a "not
  found" message counts as live, and a page that redirects counts as live and
  shows where it went.
- The checks come from SEOBandwagonBot, which obeys robots.txt and Crawl-delay
  (https://seobandwagon.com/bot). A page your robots.txt closes to bots is listed as not checked,
  never as missing.
- Each visitor gets six scans an hour. The Wayback Machine is sometimes slow or
  busy; when it does not answer, nothing is checked and you can run it again.

## What to do with the result

For each page that returns 404, decide whether it should exist. If a close match
is live, redirect the old address to it with a 301. If the page earned links or
traffic and has no match, restore it from the archived copy. If it should be gone,
a 410 says so more plainly than a 404. For the links on one live page, use the
link analyzer: https://seobandwagon.com/tools/link-analyzer

## Related tools

- Local rank checker: https://seobandwagon.com/tools/local-rank
- Place ID finder: https://seobandwagon.com/tools/place-id
- Latitude and longitude lookup: https://seobandwagon.com/tools/lat-lng
- Link analyzer: https://seobandwagon.com/tools/link-analyzer
- Google review link generator: https://seobandwagon.com/tools/google-review-link

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Canonical page: https://seobandwagon.com/tools/wayback-checker
Site overview for agents: https://seobandwagon.com/llms.txt · API docs: https://seobandwagon.com/docs/api