WebMaster Tools keeps showing old 404 error but doesn't show a "Linked From" url. Why is that?
-
Hello Moz Community.
I have a question about 404 crawl errors in WebmasterTools, a while ago we had an internal linking problem regarding some links formed in a wrong way (a loop was making links on the fly), this error was identified and fixed back then but before it was fixed google got to index lots of those malformed pages. Recently we see in our WebMaster account that some of this links still appearing as 404 but we currently don't have that issue or any internal link pointing to any of those URLs and what confuses us even more is that WebMaster doesn't show anything in the "Linked From" tab where it usually does for this type of errors, so we are wondering what this means, could be that they still in google's cache or memory? we are not really sure.
If anyone has an idea of what this errors showing up now means we would really appreciate the help. Thanks.
-
Hi Jane, thanks for the follow up. Every time we see errors showing up in WMT (mainly 404's) we remove the URL's right away and indeed we see the errors going down every 4-5 days (under HTML improvements).
I am just surprised, that if we would not use the URL removal tool, how long it takes for Google to actually remove 404's from their index. I know the higher the PR, the more likely they crawl more often and the faster they remove these 404's I guess, but still.
-
Hi again,
Four months seems abnormally long, but it could have something to do with how many 404s are are - 400 is pretty high. Is this number at least going down every few weeks in WMT?
Cheers,
Jane
-
hi Jane, we've solved the cause of these errors more than 4 months ago at this point. There is no path to these urls anymore, but they keep showing up so it takes Google pretty long to clean up. And our estimate is that there about 400 more of these 404 errors so we still have some time to go I guess.
-
Hi,
How long have these errors been appearing since you fixed the issue? It could be a case of Google looking for URLs on the site that it has seen in the past, even though there is no path to them anymore. With the pathway gone, it should stop looking, but I'm curious how long the issue has been fixed for?
-
I hate to speculate on anything involving SEO, but I've always taken those 404s as visits Google has been able to grab data for. If Webmasters is able to catch the data for a visit to a 404, it'll let you know about it.
What lead me to this cringe assumption cringe was how similar those 404s were to existing pages, like someone tried to type in a URL and got it wrong, or deleted some of it and hit "enter".
Take the info for what it's worth, which isn't fact, just an idea to get you rolling.
-
I've had those too and they are quiet annoying (love seeing 0 errors hehe). I just mark and fixed and hope it doesn't show up again (usually stops appearing after doing that once or twice).
If anyone has another other insight into this, please share!
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
-
"Equity sculpting" with internal nofollow links
I’ve been trying a couple of new site auditor services this week and they have both flagged the fact that I have some nofollow links to internal pages. I see this subject has popped up from time to time in this community. I also found a 2013 Matt Cutts video on the subject: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2298312/matt-cutts-you-dont-have-to-nofollow-internal-links At a couple of SEO conferences I’ve attended this year, I was advised that nofollow on internal links can be useful so as not to squander link juice on secondary (but necessary) pages. I suspect many websites have a lot of internal links in their footers and are sharing the love with pages which don’t really need to be boosted. These pages can still be indexed but not given a helping hand to rank by strong pages. This “equity sculpting” (I made that up) seems to make sense to me, but am I missing something? Examples of these secondary pages include login pages, site maps (human readable), policies – arguably even the general contact page. Thoughts? Regards,
Technical SEO | | Warren_Vick
Warren1 -
Webmaster tools question
Hi all. I have a question regarding http vs https. I have an https site and was wondering how to tell google in Webmaster tools to combine and use https. I have setup all sites in Webmaster tools. Both www and non www for both http and https. I see where to set up the www vs the non www but don't quite understand how to do the https part. I want all traffic to: https://www-creative -technology-solutions.com Thanks
Technical SEO | | twoacejr0 -
Redirect url that don't end with slash
Hi! I need to add in my .htaccess a way to redirect URL that don't end with / to the one thats end wth /.For example, I need http://example.com to redirect to http://www.example.com/. And, of course, this redirection should be only for URLs that don't end with /, so I don't get double // at the end. I already have the code to redirect the non-www to the www, but can't find a way to do the slash thing. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | arielbortz0 -
Webmaster Tools "Links to your site" history over time?
Is there a way to see a history of the "links to your site"? I've seen a lot of posts here from people say "I just saw a big drop in my numbers." I don't look at this number enough to be that familiar with it. Is there a way to see if Google has suddenly chopped our numbers? I've poked around a little, but not found a method yet. Thanks, Reeves
Technical SEO | | wreevesc0 -
Updating Meta Tag error quickly besides submit to index in Webmaster Tools
For a conference page marketing built the meta tag didn't have correct year and date of the conference. I updated and used webmaster tools submit to index to try and get it updated in google search quickly but meta tag has not updated. Are there other avenues to get this corrected?
Technical SEO | | inhouseninja0 -
Help with strange 404 Errors.
For the most part I have never had trouble tracking down 404's. Usually it's simply a broken link, but lately I have been getting these strange errors http://gridironexperts.com/http%3A/www.nfl.com/gamecenter?game_id=29528&season=2008&displayPage=tab_gamecenter/ What does; %C2%94 repersent? The error always points to NFL.com, but we don't link to them...like ever? Can I just 404: http://gridironexperts.com// to fix the problem, as all 404's start with this weird %C2%94 error. Is this error even on my site? Is in the backend...virus? thanks -Mike
Technical SEO | | MikePatch0 -
Client error 404
I have got a lot (100+) of 404´s. I got more the last time, so I rearranged the whole site. I even changed it from .php to .html. I have went to the web hotel to delete all of the .php files from the main server. Still, I got after yesterdays crawl 404´s on my (deleted) .php sites. There is also other links that has an error, but aren't there. Maybe those pages were there before the sites remodelling, but I don't think so because .html sites is also affected. How can this be happening?
Technical SEO | | mato0 -
I have a lot of warnings for "Overly-Dynamic URL"
I have a lot of warnings for "Overly-Dynamic URLs" but all the pages listed have a canonical with a static url , does this mean that I can ignore the warnings? Seems to me that I can but I just want to make sure?
Technical SEO | | Arnx1