404 errors High Priority Issues in Moz Pro: change to 301 or not ?
-
Hi there,
Moz Pro is showing us 404 errors on our site as High Priority Issues. These 404 errors regard deleted product pages, which we did not 301. Should we 301 them all backwards ?
We have an ecommerce site. After reading How Should You Handle Expired Content? on Moz and a few other Q&A discussions I now know we should 301 each expired url and now we do so. My concern is with what was done in the past, and what we should do about it:
- for the past few years we have been leaving the pages on the site, creating a big amount of outdated url's without either content nor traffic
- in march our IT decided to delete these url's, and ask for a webpage removal in Google Search Console: we 301 only a 40 url's and 404 the other 3500
- now 6 monthts after, we still have 2500 crawl errors in the Search Console, and Moz Pro finding each week new 404 errors
Our SEO consultant says we should not bother about the errors shown in the Search Console. But I am concerned about these errors not reducing, and about Moz Pro High Priority Issues: should we 301 the url's to similar categories or products?
-
Hi Joe,
When running a scan to find error pages or bad internal linked pages, what type of scan parameters do you use? This could make sense on why I'm seeing these strange 404 error strings, such as http://website.com/ http://www.website.com/cubic-zirconia-1/ Ideas, have you seen this before?
run a Screaming Frog scan
-
Hey Isabelle - which do you not know how to check, the analytics for those 3,500 pages or the links to them?
For the analytics you'll just go back in time to when those pages were receiving traffic and check. To check the individual pages for backlinks pointing directly to them, you'll want to use Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, or Majestic to get that data. Using at least 2 of those will give you the best data on which pages are getting links.
I would investigate as to which metrics Moz Pro is using to decide if those pages are high priority to fix. It could be that Moz Pro is basing the high priority signal on the backlinks, so dive deeper into that to find out what's triggering that and then fix that problem!
-
Hi Joe,
Thank you so much for your answer. As a matter of fact much of these 3,500 pages don't receive much traffic anymore, but a lot of them have natural external links since they were product pages. The problem is, I don't know how to check it.
Your informations regarding the Search Console are usefull, so I will have to live with it being full of crawl errors. But what should I do with MOZ PRO showing some of the 404 as High Priority Issues? Does it actually mean, that those url's are somehow important and should be 301 redirect? So is MOZ PRO more liable than the Search Console on this point?
-
Hey Isabelle,
From the How Should You Handle Expired Content? post, I agree that those 4 steps outlined are the best questions to ask:
- Was there significant traffic (and not just organic, but also consider direct) coming to this page?
- How can we provide the best user experience?
- Has this page received external links? How is this page currently internally linked to?
- Is there content/resources on the page that users would still find useful?
Were those 40 pages you chose to 301 the only pages that were receiving any type of traffic, or are there perhaps more out of the other 3,500?
If some of those 3,500 pages have links from external websites linking to them, make it a high priority to 301 redirect those URLs to related category or product pages.
If some of those 3,500 pages are receiving decent amounts of visits to them still (you can see this in Google Analytics) then you can consider 301 redirecting those to improve UX and recover some traffic that may be bouncing. Set a threshold depending on the size of your site, maybe only recover URLs that have more than 10 visits a month or so.
As far as seeing the errors in Search Console, it can be annoying sometimes, but Google shows a lot of stuff as informational and it doesn't necessarily need to be acted upon. Here's a related question on Moz about that. If the pages are long gone, you don't have to worry about Google showing them.
But if you're wondering how Google is discovering these, it's possible there are old sitemaps they're crawling, or even pages on your site that link to those old pages. Definitely run a Screaming Frog scan on your site to try and uncover those.
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
-
Error Code 902 & 403
Several thousand of these popped up on my Crawl Report and the links appear to be searches, i.e. below 902: http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=product/search&tag=nasa+ma-1+jacket%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F 403: http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=product/search&tag=periodic+table+tshirt%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F I don't want Moz, let alone Google finding this kind of nonsensical link but I don't exactly know what the problem is or how to fix it. Am I right in thinking these are pages people have searched for? Can anyone shed light on this please?
Moz Pro | | moon-boots0 -
Is my 404 page set up correctly?
HI there! In using a few different tools, and I have received varied result concerning my 404 page. In WebSite Auditor from Link Assistant, it says my page is set up incorrectly. My webmaster has told me that it is set up correctly, but at this point I'm not entirely sure what's what. Is there another way to test it? I guess i'm not quite sure about the jargon and what "return 404 response code" actually means. Thanks for your help!
Moz Pro | | NutcrackerBalletGifts0 -
MOZ Pro - Page Grader Queries
Greetings! I started a new position last week and the extremely supportive director promised to give me anything I required to make my job easier. Of course, my first port of call was MOZ Pro. Having never used MOZ Pro before, I've just been getting to grips with it, fixing any pressing issues and giving the whole site a general SEO health check. A few fairly major issues have been flagged, which I'm in the process of fixing, and I'm currently putting our main landing pages through the MOZ Page Grader. After a little bit of tinkering, our iPhone 6 cases page has been graded B for the term 'iPhone 6 cases', but I have a few queries/concerns regarding some of the suggested fixes: **Avoid keyword stuffing in document **- The term 'iphone 6 cases' only appears thrice in the body, so it can't be that? The term, however, appears 23 times in the page's img alt tags. Could this be the issue? This is an ecommerce site that sells iPhone 6 cases, so the img alt tags are bound to contain that keyword. Each img alt tag is unique, so I don't really know what I can do here? "Show details for YouSave iPhone 6 0.6mm Clear Gel Case" is the example of the img alt tag of one of the products on that page, surely I can't remove the words 'iPhone 6 case'? Avoid too many internal links - MOZ suggests keeping the internal links to below 100 or, at a minimum, less than 100 links on the main navigation menu. I haven't counted, but I'd guess that page has more than 100 links, but not too many on the navigation menu. To me, this looks like a standard ecommerce page, with links to products and different pages via the top and bottom menus. Would I improve visibility if I reduced the amount of links by, say, reducing the number of products on the page? We currently have it set to 36, but can easily be reduced. Only One Canonical URL - We've put a fix in place for this issue and are just waiting for it to go live. For some reason rel=canonical tags have been duplicated on the majority of the pages. Like I say, this is being remedied, but I just wondered whether a duplicate tag negatively affect the page's visibility? The tags are identical and just point to the page they're on. I think that's about it for now! Thanks in advance and keep up the good work! Cheers, Lewis (Andrew is the name of the director) UPDATE Now I've sorted the rel=canonical issue, the pages are being graded A but still with the first two suggestions above.
Moz Pro | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Moz shows an F grade and 0 keywords on a previously high ranking page - Please help
Hi all, Moz is showing an F grade and 0 keywords across all URL, Title, Meta, H1, Meta and IMG ALT. My page has also dropped from 1st page rankings for numerous pages to 2nd and 3rd page. The page I am talking about is: http://year13.com.au/10-highest-paying-jobs-you-can-get-without-a-degree/ The keywords/phrases we were previously ranking very well for are: High paying jobs in Australia High paying jobs Highest paying jobs you can get with no degree Etc Etc I have also seen reduction in rankings on other keywords/ pages as well. Does anyone know why this might have happened? And what might be happening? Thanks in advance!
Moz Pro | | Stubs0 -
Since July 1, we've had a HUGE jump in errors on our weekly crawl. We don't think anything has changed on our website. Has MOZ changed something that would account for a large leap in duplicate content and duplicate title errors?
Our error report went from 1,900 to 18,000 in one swoop, starting right around the first of July. The errors are duplicate content and duplicate title, as if it does not see our 301 redirects. Any insights?
Moz Pro | | KristyFord0 -
A 301 redirect to a page with a rel canonical to a page with a 301 question...
MOZ registers thousands of DC and Duplicate titles on a Drupal site which has a little strange setup. Example: www.1234.com/en-us 301 redirects to www.realsite.com/en-us which has a rel canonical to www.1234.com which 301 redirects to www.realsite.com. If you're still with me I thank you.
Moz Pro | | Crunchii
My question is since MOZ registers errors, if indeed the rel canonical isn't recognized due to a 301 redirect?0 -
How to run down the actual source of a 404 error that is reported.
In my 404 errors, the second entry is as follows: URL: http://www.virginiahomesandforeclosures.com/listing/0428387-lot-k-commerce-park-franklin-va-23851/REWIDX_URL_CDNimg/no-image.gif Is there a simple way to find the root or page in which this error was generated? IF I visit this page " http://www.virginiahomesandforeclosures.com/listing/0428387-lot-k-commerce-park-franklin-va-23851" without the attached gobble de gook, I see a good page. So bottom line its possible it could be in one of my sitemaps, but I have 50 of those so its time consuming to search thru all 50 for each error like this since I have so many. I am pretty sure its not in my sitemaps, since google has not picked up any of these errors and they have crawled over 12,000 urls so far. When google gives me a 404 error I can click on the link and find what pages they found the link and go there and correct it at the root. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I have more than 1,000 of these errors with the bad url with the junk attached to the end and have not been able to isolate the cause yet. Thanks in advance.
Moz Pro | | tommytx0 -
How to Fix the Errors with Duplicate Title or Content?
The latest Crawl Diagnostic has found 160 Errors on my site.
Moz Pro | | hanmark
And my error is, that the same content or title is used on two different! pages:
on both my root domain (han-mark.com) and the www subdomain. What does it matter (with or without www)? How serious is that error? Do I need to fix all the errors (and hundreds of warnings too)? What's the best practice? Is there any Guide on how to do it
or Tools for doing it the fast way? Viggo Joergensen0