URL Errors in webmaster tools to pages that don't exist?
-
Hello, for sometime now we have URLs showing up in Google webmaster saying these are 404 errors but don't exist on our website.......but also never have?
Heres an example
cosmetic-dentistry/28yearold-southport-dentist-wins-best-young-dentist-award/801530293
The root being this goo.gl/vi4N4F
Really confused about this? We have recently made our website wordpress?
Thanks
Ade
-
Ok great, thanks for your advice Linda, have a nice day.!
-
Sometimes people make pages like that as landing pages for PPC or other types of campaigns and then abandon them.
I found one like that on one of my sites once by noticing that a page I did not recognize was getting a lot of search traffic--I ended up integrating it into my structure with a new URL, and 301 redirecting the old URL to that new page.
If you think those might be good pages for you, different from similar pages you might already have, you can update them and do that as well.
If they are not especially useful to you, you could just 301 them to the most similar pages. [Are they getting traffic? I think Google must see something in them, if they are still indexed.] They probably wouldn't do any harm if you just leave them, but I'd take care of them anyway.
-
Ok great, thanks Linda, its odd because Google isn't saying where its linked or they are linked from like it normally does.
Did you see this question
would this page http://goo.gl/YoPg0q and this page http://goo.gl/kRq0Pd be classed as ghosting? this wasn't the intention but Ive come across this page whilst doing some site research from along time ago and wondering if it would effect my ranking? Should i put a 301 or do you think its ok to leave?
Thanks, i appreciate your feedback.
-
Sometimes when people link to you, they make a mistake (or even make up pages from what I can tell--I have seen some weird things). In that case, Google will still try to look for it and report back to you that it saw a link to such a page somewhere. [In Webmaster Tools, you will be able to see the referring site.]
What I do in a case like that is ignore it, unless it seems to be from a good site. In that case, I contact the site with a correct link and if I get no reply, I just create a redirect of the link to a relevant page.
-
Hi, yes this is what i mean, this is why I'm so confused by it. It has never been a page on the website, we've checked an triple checked this.
-
A 404 is not a redirect, it means not found. So it is probably the case that someone linked to that page when it was up and Google is following that old link and not finding the page.
-
Sorry Linda, just re-read when you say 301, its in google webmaster tools that its saying 404 error?
Thanks
-
Brilliant, thanks Moz guys, its helpful. One other question as i have you...
would this page http://goo.gl/YoPg0q and this page http://goo.gl/kRq0Pd be classed as ghosting? this wasn't the intention but Ive come across this page whilst doing some site research from along time ago and wondering if it would effect my ranking? Should i put a 301 or do you think its ok to leave? Thanks
-
You mean a 301 redirect? If one of the duplicates is already 301 redirected to the other, like Jaime said, just mark it fixed. [Though if it comes back up, take another look at it, because it means that Google is not seeing the fix you think you made.]
As far as affecting your SEO, duplication can cause the less relevant duplicate to not show up in search but does not cause any penalty as such. [Though make sure your internal linking uses your correct and current URLs.]
-
Ok thanks, Oddly in webmaster tools it shows HTML improvements as duplicate title tags:
/clinic_locations.html
/uk-clinics-luton-wolverhampton-locations/But the .html hasn't been around for ages, maybe 2 years? It has a 404 re-direct. Im wondering 2 things. Should I ignore this and will it be effecting my seo and if so is there any more i can do about it?
Thanks
-
This is likely just a URL from your old website structure that somebody has put a link to somewhere out there on the web (Possibly incorrectly with a typo). I would 301 redirect to the most relevant page you have on the Wordpress site and mark it as Fixed on WMT.
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
-
Will URLS With Existing 301 Redirects Be as Powerful As New URLS In Serps?
Most products on our site have redirects to them from years of switching platform and merely trying to get a great and optimised URL for SEO purposes. My question is this: If a product URL has alot of redirects (301's), would it be more beneficial to me to create a duplicated version of the product and start fresh with a new URL? I am not on here trying to gain backlinks but my site is tn nursery dot net (proof:)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tammysons
I need some quality help figuring out what to do.
Tammy0 -
Canonical URL's For Two Domains
We have two websites, one we use for Google PPC (website 1) and one (website 2) we use for everything else. The reason is we are in an industry that Google Adwords doesn't like, so we built a whole other website that removes the product descriptions as Google Adwords doesn't approve of many of them (nutrition). Right now we have that Google Adwords approved website (website 1) no-index/no-follow because we didn't want to run into potential duplicate content issues in free search, but the issue is we can't submit it to Google Shopping...as they require it to be indexable. Do you think removing the no-index/no-follow from that website 1 and adding canonical URL's pointing to website 2 would resolve this issue (being able to submit it to Google Shopping) and not cause any problems with duplicate content? I was thinking of adding the canonical tag to all pages of website 1 and point it to website 2. Does that make sense? Do you think that would work?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vetofunk0 -
Old URL that has been 301'd for months appearing in SERPs
We created a more keyword friendly url with dashes instead of underscores in December. That new URL is in Google's Index and has a few links to it naturally. The previous version of the URL (with underscores) continues to rear it's ugly head in the SERPs, though when you click on it you are 301'd to the new url. The 301 is implemented correctly and checked out on sites such as http://www.redirect-checker.org/index.php. Has anyone else experienced such a thing? I understand that Google can use it's discretion on pages, title tags, canonicals, etc.... But I've never witnessed them continue to show an old url that has been 301'd to a new for months after discovery or randomly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoaustin0 -
Any issue? Redirect 100's of domains into one website's internal pages
Hi all, Imagine if you will I was the owner of many domains, say 100 demographically rich kwd domains & my plan was to redirect these into one website - each into a different relevant subfolder. e.g. www.dewsburytilers..com > www.brandname.com/dewsbury/tilers.html www.hammersmith-tilers.com > www.brandname.com/hammersmith/tilers.html www.tilers-horsforth.com > www.brandname.com/horsforth/tilers.html another hundred or so 301 redirects...the backlinks to these domains were slim but relevant (the majority of the domains do not have any backlinks at all - can anyone see a problem with this practice? If so, what would your recommendations be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fergclaw0 -
What to do about old urls that don't logically 301 redirect to current site?
Mozzers, I have changed my site url structure several times. As a result, I now have a lot of old URLs that don't really logically redirect to anything in the current site. I started out 404-ing them, but it seemed like Google was penalizing my crawl rate AND it wasn't removing them from the index after being crawled several times. There are way too many (>100k) to use the URL removal tool even at a directory level. So instead I took some advice and changed them to 200, but with a "noindex" meta tag and set them to not render any content. I get less errors but I now have a lot of pages that do this. Should I (a) just 404 them and wait for Google to remove (b) keep the 200, noindex or (c) are there other things I can do? 410 maybe? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcgoodrich0 -
Requesting New Custom URL for Google+ Local Business Page
This question is about the new custom URLs for Google+ Local Business pages: Has anyone heard any success stories with requesting a custom URL different than the two reserved ones offered by Google via contacting a Google Rep by phone? And what advantages might there be for a local business to go with a very long custom URL such asgoogle.com/+rosenbergAndDalgrenLLPFortLauderdale as opposed to just google.com/+RdLawyers? Does having the city name in the URL offer any <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> benefit? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gbkevin0 -
Robots.txt error message in Google Webmaster from a later date than the page was cached, how is that?
I have error messages in Google Webmaster that state that Googlebot encountered errors while attempting to access the robots.txt. The last date that this was reported was on December 25, 2012 (Merry Christmas), but the last cache date was November 16, 2012 (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.etundra.com/robots.txt&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a). How could I get this error if the page hasn't been cached since November 16, 2012?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eTundra0 -
Page URL Issue
Hey Friend, I am having sort of a problem. I currently have a subpage with the url of: /musclecars/ I also have a subpage at /muscle-cars/muscle-car-restoration.html Obviously my main url is not listed here. My problem is I am trying to rank for the term Muscle Cars but the first URL does not have the keywords seperated so I rank no where. If I type MuscleCars into google I rank though (but nobody types the keyword in like that). So my question is can I create muscle-cars.mydomainname.com and rank well with that? Or is it better to just use mydomainname.com/muscle-cars/ even though that second term I am ranking for already has that in its url?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shandaman0