Why is Google Webmaster Tools reporting a massive increase in 404s?
-
Several weeks back, we launched a new website, replacing a legacy system moving it to a new server. With the site transition, webroke some of the old URLs, but it didn't seem to be too much concern. We blocked ones I knew should be blocked in robots.txt, 301 redirected as much duplicate data and used canonical tags as far as I could (which is still an ongoing process), and simply returned 404 for any others that should have never really been there.
For the last months, I've been monitoring the 404s Google reports in Web Master Tootls (WMT) and while we had a few hundred due to the gradual removal duplicate data, I wasn't too concerned. I've been generating updated sitemaps for Google multiple times a week with any updated URLs. Then WMT started to report a massive increase in 404s, somewhere around 25,000 404s per day (making it impossible for me to keep up). The sitemap.xml has new URL only but it seems that Google still uses the old sitemap from before the launch. The reported sources of 404s (in WMT) don't exist anylonger. They all are coming from the old site.
I attached a screenshot showing the drastic increase in 404s. What could possibly cause this problem?
-
Thank you for both responses...
Nakul--
I have been following everything exactly as you have described. In general the goal during the development was to keep changes to an absolute minimum. This has not always been possible.
The majority of external links have been 301 redirected or in cases where the new server responds to two differnet URLs for the same content a canonical tag has been added.
I have noticed that 99% of the reported URLs are former internal links. The reported 404s are completely out of proportion (194k vs less than 5k pages in the new xml sitemap).
I am really worried. Is there anything else I can do beside monitoring and hopping?
How long does it typically take to for "Things have to work their way out of its system."?
Is it possible that Google is somehow accessing the old IP address (although the DNS records for the domain have changed)? We left the old server alive and planning to shut it down after the second site has been moved away from it.
Thanks,
Adam
-
Agreed; it could an after effect and stems from inbound URLs to your site from other sites. That's what the majority of the 404s I see in GWT come from (vs being bad pages within my site).
Google probably isn't using the old sitemap if you gave them a new one. What could be happening is that it still needs to "reorganize" and reconcile your old URLs and new URLs. The indexed pages don't just disappear overnight or get replaced immediately because of a site map change. Things have to work their way out of its system.
If there's specific URLs you want to try to remedy immediately, look into the GWT Remove URL option under the optimization section.
-
What I'd suggest doing is randomly revising some of those 404's that appear and check whether they should indeed be 404s. Are there any bulk rules / wildcard 301s you can implement to redirect the traffic for 3-6 months ?
These URLs are usually found from external links to your website. When you click on a detail of any of the reported 404s, it tells you what the error details are, whether this link is in the sitemap or where it is linked from. You'd realize in most cases it's linked from somewhere. If it's an internal link, correct it. If it's external, do you think the webmaster might update it if you contact them or is it easier to just set a 301, retaining the SEO value ?
I hope this helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How do you report SEO audit findings?
Hello, Mozzers! I'm curious to know how you report SEO audit findings. Do you use a spreadsheet? A presentation? A formal report? Or maybe something else. If you have a favourite audit template, I'd love to see it. A second question: what things do you report in an audit? I currently report crawl findings, authority and trust, link profiles, and competitive analysis. I also investigate a site's security—that's not usually part of an audit, but site owners need to know about it. What do you report to your audit customers? Thanks for sharing your auditing wisdom!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyKubrin0 -
Product Pages not indexed by Google
We built a website for a jewelry company some years ago, and they've recently asked for a meeting and one of the points on the agenda will be why their products pages have not been indexed. Example: http://rocks.ie/details/Infinity-Ring/7170/ I've taken a look but I can't see anything obvious that is stopping pages like the above from being indexed. It has a an 'index, follow all' tag along with a canonical tag. Am I missing something obvious here or is there any clear reason why product pages are not being indexed at all by Google? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Update I was told 'that each of the product pages on the full site have corresponding page on mobile. They are referred to each other via cannonical / alternate tags...could be an angle as to why product pages are not being indexed.'
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobbieD910 -
Google is indexing the wrong pages
I have been having problems with Google indexing my website since mid May. I haven't made any changes to my website which is wordpress. I have a page with the title 'Peterborough Cathedral wedding', I search Google for 'wedding Peteborough Cathedral', this is not a competitive search phrase and I'd expect to find my blog post on page one. Instead, half way down page 4 I find Google has indexed www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk/blog with the title 'wedding photojournalist | Portfolio', what google has indexed is a link to the blog post and not the blog post itself. I repeated this for several other blog posts and keywords and found similar results, most of which don't make any sense at all - A search for 'Menorca wedding photography' used to bring up one of my posts at the top of page one. Now it brings up a post titled 'La Mare wedding photography Jersey" which happens to have a link to the Menorca post at the bottom of the page. A search for 'Broadoaks country house weddng photography' brings up 'weddingphotojournalist | portfolio' which has a link to the Broadoaks post. a search for 'Blake Hall wedding photography' does exactly the same. In this case Google is linking to www.weddingphotojournalist.blog again, this is a page of recent blog posts. Could this be a problem with my sitemap? Or the Yoast SEO plugin? or a problem with my wordpress theme? Or is Google just a bit confused?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | weddingphotojournalist0 -
We are ignored by Google - what should we do?
Hi, We believe that our website - https://en.greatfire.org - is being all but ignored by Google Search. The following two examples illustrate our case. 1. Searching for “China listening in on Skype - Microsoft assumes you approve”. This is the title of a blog post that we wrote which received some 50,000 visits. On Yahoo and Bing search, we rank first for this search. On Google, however, we rank 7th. Each of the six pages ranking higher than us are quoting and linking to our story. 2. Searching for “Online Censorship In China”. This is the title of our front page. Yahoo and Bing both rank us third for this search. On Google, however, we are not even among the first 300 results. Two of the pages among the first 10 results link to us. Our website has an average of around 1000 visits per day. We are quoted in and linked from virtually all Western mainstream media (see https://en.greatfire.org/press). Yet to this day we are receiving almost no traffic from Google Search. Our mission is to bring transparency to online censorship in China. If people could find us in Google, it would greatly help to spread awareness of the extent of Internet restrictions here. If you could indicate to us what the cause of our poor rankings could be, we would be very grateful. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GreatFire.org0 -
Sites banned from Google?
How do you find out sites banned from Google? I know how to find out sites no longer cached, or is it the same thing once deindexed? As always aprpeciate your advice everyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Does Google index url with hashtags?
We are setting up some Jquery tabs in a page that will produce the same url with hashtags. For example: index.php#aboutus, index.php#ourguarantee, etc. We don't want that content to be crawled as we'd like to prevent duplicate content. Does Google normally crawl such urls or does it just ignore them? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoppc20120 -
Google Webmaster Tools Sitemap errors for phantom urls?
Two weeks ago we changed our urls so the correct addresses are all lowercase. Everything else 301 redirects to those. We have submitted and made sure that Google has downloaded our updated sitemap several times since. Even so, Webmaster Tools is reporting 33000 + errors in our sitemap for urls that are no longer in our sitemap and haven't been for weeks. It claims to have found the errors within the last couple of days but the sitemap has been updated for a couple of weeks and has been downloaded by Google at least three times since. Here is our sitemap: http://www.aquinasandmore.com/urllist.xml Here are a couple of urls that Webmaster Tools says are in the sitemap: http://www.aquinasandmore.com/catholic-gifts/Caroline-Gerhardinger-Large-Sterling-Silver-Medal/sku/78664
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTheScot
Redirect error unavailable
Oct 7, 2011
http://www.aquinasandmore.com/catholic-gifts/Catherine-of-Bologna-Small-Gold-Filled-Medal/sku/78706
Redirect error unavailable
Oct 7, 20110