Hello, can anyone please critique my method for locating every live page on a large website?
I am working on a site with more than 3,000 pages, including product pages. There has been little to no governance prior.
There is no way to export a list of pages from our headless CMS.
The website is heavily fragmented (e.g., the pages under “/product-information” are silo’d by product, because there is a seperate subfolder for categories of products that link to corresponding /product-information pages, so I can’t start from a main /product-information page in Screaming Frog and expect to find them all)
Therefore, I am pulling every page that GA found over the past year; every page GSC logged; every page that shows up in a comprehensive Screaming Frog crawl that uses GA4 and GSC API’s .
I am going section by section, pulling the list of pages in a given subfolder from each source into a spreadsheet. The group of pages from each subfolder is in a different column.
I am manually removing URLs with parameters. Then, I’m using a script to identify the pages in all three columns and which ones are not in all three columns (exceptions).
I am then running the list of exceptions through Screaming Frog to reveal 404 and 500 errors. The ones with 200 statuses get added to the list of pages in all three columns.
At this stage, I’m also spot-checking the Exception URLs for ones that may be correct if I manually fix typos.
That, in part is why I’m going section by section and not doing the entire site at once: So the list is still relatively small enough to spot-check and also keep an eye out for any trends.
Once I’m done, I can either spot-check against what’s in our headless CMS, or manually go folder-by-folder in the CMS to look for anything I missed.
I imagine I will miss some non-indexed or orphan pages, but this should get me close.
Any thoughts, suggestions, constructive criticism appreciated!
Thanks in advance.

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1 Comment
Hi Jack,
Besides what you’re doing, I would also suggest to:
1) Create individual GSC profiles for each of your site paths/categories/subcategories and then use the GSC Performance as well as Indexed Pages report by exporting those URLs listed there for each.
2) Use Search Analytics for Sheets: https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/search_analytics_for_sheets/1035646374811, an easy way to export URLs with any activity from the search console without the limitations of GSC UI.
3) Using tools like Semrush/Ahrefs/Sistrix/etc. and check the URLs attracting any rankings as well as backlinks since a couple of years ago or so.
I hope this helps!