Increase in Not Found Errors
-
Hello All,
Looking for input on an issue I am having.
We used to have a website www.gazaro.com. It was a price comparison engine for consumers. A shift in the focus of the business resulted in www.360pi.com - a price intelligence tool for retailers.The two websites have similar themes, so I thought it would be valuable to pass SEO juice from the old domain to the new domain.Back in August, I noticed that Gazaro was redirected to 360pi with a meta refresh. I know a 301 redirect is preferable to a meta refresh, so we switched to a 301 redirect.Since that happened, there has been a spike in 404 errors in webmaster tools. If you hover over the url, it is actuallywww.360pi.com/deal/amazon etc etc. It is looking for gazaro urls on the 360pi domain - which don't exist. I think this is hurting our homepage ranking. Our homepage no longer ranks for "price intelligence" when it used to be in pos. 4 or 5. As it turns out, we are ranking #1 for "price intelligence" but with our product page.I'm wondering why the 404 are happening. Is something setup in correctly? Or should I have them switch back to a meta refresh.Thoughts? Thanks for your help PNM1cYO
-
Hi Amanda
You could just change your single pattern matched 301 to point all links to your old site to the home page of the new site. That way at least someone who clicks on a link to your old site will find the new site. Also without a 301 for all the links on your old site those old URLs are going to sit around in the indexes of search engines for a long time.
Peter
-
Thanks Dave and Peter - your responses are helpful.
You are correct, my goal was to do a server side 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain with the hopes of passing on SEO benefit since the website theme is similar (but targeting different audience consumer vs retailer). I understand that the poor user experience of this is now likely hurting us since the same relative path does not exist.
I'm going to remove the 301 all together since it is not helping us, and very possibly is hurting us.
-
Hi Amanda
How many 301 redirects do you have on your old site? From what you have said it sounds like just one. Is that correct of have I misunderstood something?
If you have pattern-matched all the URLs from your old site to your new site and if those URLs don't exist on your new site, then a 404 is exactly what you will get.
A single pattern-matched redirect will only work if the relative path on the new site to pages is the same relative path that it was on the old site. So if you have the following:
oldsite.com/big-widgets.html
oldsite.com/little-widgets.html
etcand you just create a single 301 redirect that says all the pages on oldsite.com have now moved to newsite.com, then the URLs on the new site will be expected to be found at the same relative paths as follows:
newsite.com/big-widgets.html
newsite.com/little-widgets.html
etcIf they are not then you will get 404s.
If your new site has the same pages as on your old site but at a different relative path then the only way to 301 redirect the old URLs is to directly cross reference them. So, for example, if the big-widgets.html page on your new site was now at a URL of widgets-big.html you would need a direct 301 redirect from oldsite.com/big-widgets.html to newsite.com/widgets-big.html for the correct page to be found.
Having rambled on about this it may be that you have done nothing like I have said (sorry about that!), but it's just that when you said "so we switched to a 301 redirect", i.e. that sounds like just one 301 redirect, not many of them.
I hope my ramblings help!
Peter
-
I'd have to see more detail to know what the 404 issue is but let me jump in and say that a big problem with the way you've done it is 301ing every page on the domain to the homepage of the new site. This is saying, "Hey Google, we're not worried about sending the visitors to a page that contains information they want." I can't say for sure of course (darn Google and their tight lips) but I'd bet dollars to donuts that they're devaluing all your links assuming that nothing is relevant since they can't assume relevancy from the way the redirect site-wide are being handled.
The 301's domain also have a "less than ideal" domains to backlinks ratio so that's likely stacking on top.
Can't answer the question here but thought I'd comment on what might be causing some of your problems.
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
-
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 -
How to explain "No Return Tags" Error from non-existing page?
In the Search Console of our Google Webmaster account we see 3 "no return tags" errors. The attached screenshot shows the detail of one of these errors. I know that annotations must be confirmed from the pages they are pointing to. If page A links to page B, page B must link back to page A, otherwise the annotations may not be interpreted correctly. However, the originating URL (/#!/public/tutorial/website/joomla) doesn't exist anymore. How could these errors still show up? Screenshot%202016-07-11%2017.36.27.png?dl=0
Technical SEO | | Maximuxxx0 -
Some URLs were not accessible to Googlebot due to an HTTP status error.
Hello I'm a seo newbie and some help from the community here would be greatly appreciated. I have submitted the sitemap of my website in google webmasters tools and now I got this warning: "When we tested a sample of the URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs were not accessible to Googlebot due to an HTTP status error. All accessible URLs will still be submitted." How do I fix this? What should I do? Many thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | GoldenRanking140 -
Responsive web design has a crawl error of redirecting to HTTP instead of HTTPS ? is this because of the new update of google that appreciates the HTTPs more?
We at yamsafer.me are using a Repsonsive web design! A crawl errors occured which redirects the hompage to an HTTP version instead of HTTPS? Any ideas on why this happened?
Technical SEO | | Yamsafer.com0 -
Crawl errors which ones should i sort out
Hi, just had my website updated to joomla 3.0 and i have around 4000 urls not found. now i have been told i need to redirect these but i would just like to check on here to make sure i am doing the right thing and the advice i have been given is not correct. I have been told these errors are the reason for the drop in rankings. I need to know if i should redirect all of these 4,000 urls or only the ones that are being linked to from outside of the site. I think about 3,000 of these have no links from outside of the site, but if i do not redirect them all then i am going to keep getting the error messages. around 2,000 of these url not found are from the last time we updated the site which was a couple of years ago and i thought they would have died off now. any advice on what i should do would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Pdf page titles and descriptions errors
In my weekly crawl report I suddenly have a huge number of title not found and missing page descriptions errors for all of my pdf files. The pdfs do have a page title (defined in the file/properties tab) However these page titles are not being picked up by the crawler or google. Any ideas how do I fix this? ( I am using the Adrobat 9 Distiller)
Technical SEO | | PerriCline0 -
My site cannot be found by google at all
I don't know why but our company site can not be found by google at all. I have submitted to google webmaster, have social media point to, etc, Is there any reason for this? url for our website is www.bistosamerica.com Thank you
Technical SEO | | BistosAmerica0 -
How to fix 404 (Client Error) errors in wordpress blog?
hey A very quick question...after analyzed my wp blog I've found "34" 404 (Client Error) Errors and I don't know how to fix it, do you know how?? *I renew html code of 404 of my wordpress blog.
Technical SEO | | akitmane1