Unfindable 404's
-
So I have noticed that my site has some really strange 404's that are only being linked to from internal links from the site.
When I go to the pages that Web master tools suggests I can't actaully find the link which is pointing to the 404. In that instance what do you do?Any help would be much appreciated
-
Thanks guys!
-
Adam, this happens to me quite a few times and I would highly recommend the suggestion by Matt... If you are not willing to invest in screaming frog and still need the full report then in that case I would suggest you to use XENU
-
Thats so much!
I don't have access to the paid version of screaming frog, so I'm just using Web Master Tools and a broken link app on Chrome....
But do you really think that is the best use of time? Wouldn't it just be more effective to just 301 it to a relevant page OR a generic 404 page?
Cheers
-
First, take it up with Screaming Frog to see if it's still an issue. http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
Once you know where your 404s are and where they're coming from, just use "view source" and search the supposedly broken code to find out what it's linked to. You can usually tell just by looking around the code and poking a bit to find out where. If not, give us a page and a 404 to look at and we'll do our best!
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
-
404's being re-indexed
Hi All, We are experiencing issues with pages that have been 404'd being indexed. Originally, these were /wp-content/ index pages, that were included in Google's index. Once I realized this, I added in a directive into our htaccess to 404 all of these pages - as there were hundreds. I tried to let Google crawl and remove these pages naturally but after a few months I used the URL removal tool to remove them manually. However, Google seems to be continually re/indexing these pages, even after they have been manually requested for removal in search console. Do you have suggestions? They all respond to 404's. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Tom3_151 -
Good alternatives to Xenu's Link Sleuth and AuditMyPc.com Sitemap Generator
I am working on scraping title tags from websites with 1-5 million pages. Xenu's Link Sleuth seems to be the best option for this, at this point. Sitemap Generator from AuditMyPc.com seems to be working too, but it starts handing up, when a sitemap file, the tools is working on,becomes too large. So basically, the second one looks like it wont be good for websites of this size. I know that Scrapebox can scrape title tags from list of url, but this is not needed, since this comes with both of the above mentioned tools. I know about DeepCrawl.com also, but this one is paid, and it would be very expensive with this amount of pages and websites too (5 million ulrs is $1750 per month, I could get a better deal on multiple websites, but this obvioulsy does not make sense to me, it needs to be free, more or less). Seo Spider from Screaming Frog is not good for large websites. So, in general, what is the best way to work on something like this, also time efficient. Are there any other options for this? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | blrs120 -
On March 10 a client's newsroom disappeared out of the SERPS. Any idea why?
For years the newsroom, which is on the subdomain news.davidlerner.com - has ranked #2 for their brand name search. On march 10 it fell out of the SERPs - it is completely gone. What happened? How can I fix this?
Technical SEO | | MeritusMedia0 -
We can't figure out why competitors have better position(s) in Google
We are using MOZ analytics for some days now, and it really helps us with important information about our rankings.
Technical SEO | | wilcoXXL
I hope you guys can help us out with the following particular case; In google.nl (dutch) we rank position #18 with the following searchterm 'sphinx 345' one of our competitors rank position #3.
We used the MOZ On Page Grade tool to find out some details about the two pages:
Our page #18: http://goo.gl/cTsbmI
Competitor page #3: http://goo.gl/qk21sM Our page hits an A and Keyword usage for "sphinx 345" = 52
The competitors page hits an A too and Keyword usage for "sphinx 345" = 45 About the link structure; for our page there is no link data found in Open Site Explorer. The url exists about a year and a half now.
I'm also very sure we have many internal links to this url.
Does Google and other crawlers have a hard time to crawl our site?(it's a Magento site, our competitors do have custom-made e-commerce systems, maybe that has something to do with it?) As i were saying;we can't figure this out. I hope you guys can help to get us any further. Regards, Wilco0 -
Find all 404 links in my site that are indexed
Hi All, Find all 404 links in my site that are indexed. We deleted a lot of URl's from site but now i dont have the track of all we deleted. Any site/Tool can scan the index and give me the exact URL's so I can use https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals?hl=en&rlf=all Regards Martin
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Mass 404 Checker?
Hi all, I'm currently looking after a collection of old newspaper sites that have had various developments during their time. The problem is there are so many 404 pages all over the place and the sites are bleeding link juice everywhere so I'm looking for a tool where I can check a lot of URLs at once. For example from an OSE report I have done a random sampling of the target URLs and some of them 404 (eek!) but there are too many to check manually to know which ones are still live and which ones have 404'd or are redirecting. Is there a tool anyone uses for this or a way one of the SEOMoz tools can do this? Also I've asked a few people personally how to check this and they've suggested Xenu, Xenu won't work as it only checks current site navigation. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | thisisOllie0 -
404 not working?
Apologies - not strictly a search question, although I am concerned that it may be negatively impacting my sites. If I enter an invalid URL - the "page not found 404 error" doesn't seem to be working. I can enter http://www.%sitename%/index.php/randomnamemadeup/ and it displays the homepage (albeit with a broken CSS). I can't fathom it out - any help appreciated. Thanks, David
Technical SEO | | newstd1000 -
Dealing with 404 pages
I built a blog on my root domain while I worked on another part of the site at .....co.uk/alpha I was really careful not to have any links go to alpha - but it seems google found and indexed it. The problem is that part of alpha was a copy of the blog - so now soon we have a lot of duplicate content. The /alpha part is now ready to be taken over to the root domain, the initial plan was to then delete /alpha. But now that its indexed I'm worried that Ill have all these 404 pages. I'm not sure what to do.. I know I can just do a 301 redirect for all those pages to go to the other ones in case a link comes on but I need to delete those pages as the server is already very slow. Or does a 301 redirect mean that I don't need those pages anymore? Will those pages still get indexed by google as separate pages? Please assist.
Technical SEO | | borderbound0