Moz is reporting a broken link error but GWT is not

[gfiedel]

My latest Moz report is showing a 404 for:  http://www.fateyes.com/how-will-googles-hummingbird-affect-your-search-ranking/”ht
(and showing the link this way with the characters after the last / which are not part of the page URL)

Google Webmaster Tools says we have no errors. I'm wondering why there is this descrepancy and I'm wondering how I can track down where this link is originating from on our site. I've tried downloading screamingfrog and deeptrawl to no avail (java issues). I've also tried a couple of services online and installed Broken Link Checker plugin with no luck finding it.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!

[Robnnl]

I couldn't find it after some research. Maybe the error will dissaper after the next crawl. Normally you should be able to see the linking page. I'm sorry I couldn't help.

I did find some other things on your website you might want to fix. I just sent you a PM.

[gfiedel]

Thank you Everett. We are not using either of those plugins.

BUT! Your explanation about the double quotes got me thinking in the right direction. This blog post has an embedded infographic and when i was installing it, I had to correct a number of double quotes in the link to make the graphic appear. However, I didn't see that the attribution link had the double quotes also. So it's all solved now! Thank you again.

[gfiedel]

Thank you Robnnl. That makes sense about GWMT.

I would love to go to the linking page and solve it but I can't find where it's coming from. Clicking through to the error in Moz gives me no other information beyond the URL. It does not give me the page it's coming from. And if I don't know where the link is originating from I can't set a redirect.

Forgive me, but I don't understand how it could be an issue with an external site yet showing up as an error on my site.  Moz is telling me it's on my site, aren't they?

[Everett]

%E2%80%9D is the UTF-8 encoding for the unicode character of the right double quotation marks (double quotes). This is a somewhat common issue with some Wordpress plugins. Please refer to the two posts below, especially if you are using either the Yoast's Google Analytics plug-in or a social plugin called Links Alpha.

http://moz.com/community/q/e2-80-9d-breaking-the-url-in-wordpress

http://moz.com/community/q/google-indexing-thousands-crazy-search-results-with-25253

As for the discrepancy, it could just be that Google's crawlers are a little "smarter" than Moz.com's in figuring out when unicode characters are used to represent double quote marks. No two crawlers are going to behave exactly the same.

[Robnnl]

In my experience GWMT is always a bit later with reporting errors while Moz is there to notify you in a week. You should click though to the error in Moz to see the linking page and solve it.

If the link is on an external site, check google analytics for visitors coming at that url with a second dimension "referrer" or "source". If you can't find and change the broken link, you can redirect it untill you find out where it and solve it later :).