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
-
Redirects, 301's & 404's
I have tons of links that I have had added a redirect to after creating my companies new website. Is it bad to have all these 301s? How do I permanently redirect those links? Also, on Google Search Console it's telling me I have 1,000+ excluded links. Is this bad? Will it negatively affect me? Is this something to do with my sitemap? Any help would be greatly appreciated 🙂
Technical SEO | | sammecooper0 -
Duplicate content and 404 errors
I apologize in advance, but I am an SEO novice and my understanding of code is very limited. Moz has issued a lot (several hundred) of duplicate content and 404 error flags on the ecommerce site my company takes care of. For the duplicate content, some of the pages it says are duplicates don't even seem similar to me. additionally, a lot of them are static pages we embed images of size charts that we use as popups on item pages. it says these issues are high priority but how bad is this? Is this just an issue because if a page has similar content the engine spider won't know which one to index? also, what is the best way to handle these urls bringing back 404 errors? I should probably have a developer look at these issues but I wanted to ask the extremely knowledgeable Moz community before I do 🙂
Technical SEO | | AliMac260 -
Wordpress 404 Errors
Hi Guys, One of my clients is scratching his head after a site migration. He has moved to wordpress and now GWT is creating weird and wonderful strange 404 errors. For example http://www.allsee-tech.com/digital-signage-blog/category/clients.html There are loads like the above which seem to be made up out of his blog and navigation http://www.allsee-tech.com/clients.html works! Any ideas? Is it a rogue plugin? How do we fix? Kind Regards Neil
Technical SEO | | nezona0 -
What's the best Blogging platform
A year ago an SEO specialist evaluated my Wordpress site and said she had seen lower rankings for Wordpress sites--in general. We moved our site off any cms and design in html 5. Our blog, however, is still on Wordpress. I'm thinking about moving to the Ghost platform b/c I only a blog. The drawbacks are one author, no recent post lists, no meta tags. Is it worth it to move the site off Wordpress. Will it affect my rankings much if I have great content? Does anyone have experience with or opinions on Ghost?
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Duplicate Content - What's the best bad idea?
Hi all, I have 1000s of products where the product description is very technical and extremely hard to rewrite or create an unique one. I'll probably will have to use the contend provided by the brands, which can already be found in dozens of other sites. My options are: Use the Google on/off tags "don't index
Technical SEO | | Carlos-R
" Put the content in an image Are there any other options? We'd always write our own unique copy to go with the technical bit. Cheers0 -
Client error 404
I have an 404 error but what does that mean? I go to the site and click on the link to exampleX.com there is no problem. What can it be? The error message http://www.example.com/www.example.com/exampleX.html
Technical SEO | | mato0 -
404 errors on non-existent URLs
Hey guys and gals, First Moz Q&A for me and really looking forward to being part of the community. I hope as my first question this isn't a stupid one but I was just struggling to find any resource that dealt with the issue and am just looking for some general advice. Basically a client has raised a problem with 404 error pages - or the lack thereof- on non-existent URLs on their site; let's say for example: 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towels/asdfas' Obviously content never existed on this page so its not like you're saying 'hey, sorry this isn't here anymore'; its more like- 'there was never anything here in the first place'. Currently in this fictitious example typing in 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towels/asdfas**'** returns the same content as the 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towels' page which I appreciate isn't ideal. What I was wondering is how far do you take this issue- I've seen examples here on the seomoz site where you can edit the URI in a similar manner and it returns the same content as the parent page but with the alternate address. Should 404's be added across all folders on a site in a similar way? How often would this scenario be and issue particularly for internal pages two or three clicks down? I suppose unless someone linked to a page with a misspelled URL... Also would it be worth placing 301 redirects on a small number of common mis-spellings or typos e.g. 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towles' to the correct URLs as opposed to just 404s? Many thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | AJ2340 -
What would you do if a site's entire content is on a subdomain?
Scenario: There is a website called mydomain.com and it is a new domain with about 300 inbound links (some going to the product pages and categories), but they have some high trust links The website has categories a, b, c etc but they are all on a subdomain so instead of being mydomain.com/categoryA/productname the entire site's structure looks like subdomain.mydomain.com/categoryA/productname Would you go to the effort of 301ing the subdomain urls to the correct url structure of mydomain.com/category/product name, or would you leave it as it is? Just interested as to the extent of the issues this could cause in the future and if this is something worth resolving sooner than later.
Technical SEO | | Kerry220