Hundreds of 404 errors are showing up for pages that never existed
-
For our site, Google is suddenly reporting hundreds of 404 errors, but the pages they are reporting never existed. The links Google shows are clearly spam style, but the website hasn't been hacked. This happened a few weeks ago, and after a couple days they disappeared from WMT. What's the deal?
-
There have been a few people at Moz with similar problems with GSC. People always throw a few ideas around: maybe Google is creating URLs to try to find pages that it can't find through crawling links alone? Maybe another site was trying to hack your site by creating URLs they were hoping would trigger certain content on your site (a laughable idea now, but I remember my college professor showing us a site that put cost parameters in the URL during check out)?
However they got there, though, Eric and Chris gave you some good ways to make sure that you're not still in trouble (if you ever were).
Hope this helps!
-
I agree with Eric here so I won't repeat what he has said, simply offer additional suggestions.
Firstly, you can click on each entry from that Crawl Errors window in your screenshot and from the window that pops up, check out the "Linked From" tab. It will show you all the pages this broken one has links from.
If you're having no joy finding them on the pages manually, you can try the Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Crawl the site and if the 404s show up here (if they don't they probably don't exist anymore and you can mark them as "fixed" in Search Console) then click them and check out the "Linked From" tab at the bottom. This tool shows you not only the pages it's linked from but also the anchor text so you can go to the linking pages and use ctrl+f to find the offening link(s).
Hope that helps!
-
The 404 errors and other crawl data is provided by a separate database in Google, so the timing of the links and the data you're seeing isn't exactly "in sync" so to speak. I would do a few things--look at the pages to see if there's something on your site that might be causing the errors.
Another option is to look at the link data to see if there are any links pointing to those pages. I would use another source, such as OSE or Majestic.com to see if there are links pointing to those pages that Google isn't reporting (which is often the case).
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
-
Why are two different pages showing for the same keyword in every alternative day?
Hello Everyone, I was really confused with one of my clients search results for a single keyword. One day the home page shows up for the keyword and the other day pricing page shows in search results. I made sure that there is no keyword cannibalization and also more backlinks are pointed towards home page. But still the pricing page shows up for every alternate day. I even checked Google analytics and the most visited page is home page and not the pricing page. Also, when the pricing page shows up it will be there on 2nd page of Google search results and when the home page shows up it is going to the 4th page of search results. Please help me in figuring out this issue. Thanks
Technical SEO | | sandeep.clickdesk0 -
Banned Page
I have been using a 3rd party checker on indexed pages in google. It has shown several banned pages. I type the page in and it comes up. But it is nowhere to be found for me to delete it. It is not in the wordpress pages. It also shows up in the duplicate content section in my campaigns in moz.com. I can find the page to delete it. If it is banned then I do not want to redirect it to the correct page. Any ideas on how to fix this?
Technical SEO | | Roots70 -
Getting 404 error when open the cache link of my site
My site is hazanstadservice.se and when I am trying to open this to check the cache date i got a 404 error from google. I don't know why ? The cache page url is http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:j99uW96RuToJ:www.hazanstadservice.se/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk.
Technical SEO | | Softlogique0 -
Why would SEOMoz and GWT report 404 errors for pages that are not 404ing?
Recently, I've noticed that nearly all of the 404 errors (not soft 404) reported in GWT actually resolve to a legitimate page. This was weird, but I thought it might just be old info, so I would go through the process of checking and "mark as fixed" as necessary. However, I noticed that SEOMoz is picking up on these 404 errors in the diagnostics of the site as well, and now I'm concerned with what the problem could be. Anyone have any insight into this? Rich
Technical SEO | | secretstache0 -
Have a client that migrated their site; went live with noindex/nofollow and for last two SEOMoz crawls only getting one page crawled. In contrast, G.A. is crawling all pages. Just wait?
Client site is 15 + pages. New site had noindex/nofollow removed prior to last two crawls.
Technical SEO | | alankoen1230 -
Duplicate Meta Descriptions From Pages That Don't Exist
Hi Guys I am hoping someone can help me out here. I have had a new site built with a unique theme and using wordpress as the CMS. Everything was going fine but after checking webmaster tools today I noticed something that I just cannot get my head around. Basically I am getting warnings of Duplicate page warnings on a couple of things. 1 of which i think i can understand but do not know how to get the warning to go. Firstly I get this warning of duplicate meta desciption url 1: / url 2: /about/who-we-are I understand this as the who-we-are page is set as the homepage through the wordpress reading settings. But is there a way to make the dup meta description warning disappear The second one I am getting is the following: /services/57/ /services/ Both urls lead to the same place although I have never created the services/57/ page the services/57/ page does not show on the xml sitemap but Google obviously see it because it is a warning in webmaster tools. If I press edit on services/57/ page it just goes to edit the /services/ page/ is there a way I can remove the /57/ page safely or a method to ensure Google at least does not see this. Probably a silly question but I cannot find a real comprehensive answer to sorting this. Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | southcoasthost0 -
Noindex,follow - linked pages not showing
We have a blog on our site where the homepage and category pages have "noindex,follow" but the articles have "index,follow". Recently we have noticed that the article pages are no longer showing in the Google SERPs (but they are in Bing!) - this was done by using the "site:" search operator. Have double-checked our robots.txt file too just in case something silly had slipped in, but that's as it should be... Has anyone else noticed similar behaviour or could suggest things I could check? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Nobody15569050351140 -
Do sites really need a 404 page?
We have people posting broken links to our site is this looking us link juice as they link to 404 pages. We could redirect to the homepage or just render the home page content, in both cases we can still display a clear page not found message. Is this legal (white hat).
Technical SEO | | ed1234560