404checker.com / crawl errors
-
I noticed a few strange crawl errors in a Google Webmaster Tools account - further investigation showed they're pages that don't exist linked from here: http://404checker.com/404-checker-log
Basically that means anyone can enter a URL into the website and it'll get linked from that page, temporarily at least. As there are hundreds of links of varying quality - at the moment they range from a well known car manufacturer to a university, porn and various organ enlargement websites - could that have a detrimental effect on any websites linked? They are all nofollow.
Why would they choose to list these URLs on their website? It has some useful tools and information but I don't see the point in the log page. I have used it myself to check HTTP statuses but may look elsewhere from now on.
-
True...I must admit I don't like seeing 404 links in my reports that are potentially beyond my control. I also wondered if it breaks some sort of privacy law - there's no privacy policy I can see on the website - perhaps there should be a warning to users of the tool. I must admit it's interesting (for at least a few seconds) to spy on who has seemingly used the tool.
I'll send them an e-mail and update this post with any response.
-
As SEOs we pay close attention to our backlinks. We run various reports and desire "clean" link reports. Most SEOs, myself included, obsess a bit too much over this data.
To the best of our knowledge, bad links pointed to our site have absolutely no negative impact to our site. If there was any damage, there would be tons of "link attacks" where 10 page e-commerce sites selling acai berry and other products would be linked to from various sites with bad (404) links.
As to why this particular site shares these links, I can take a guess they want to show potential users what the results look like. The only way to truly find out is to use the site's contact form and ask
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
-
Search ranking for a term dropped from 1st/2nd to 106th in 3 months
Hello all, Just a couple notes first. I have been advised to be vague on the search term we've dropped on (in case this page ranks higher than our homepage for it). If you search for my name in Google though you should be able to figure out where I work (I'm not the soccer player). While I am looking for an answer, I've also posted this question on a couple other forums (see https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4934323.htm and https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/webmasters/AQLD7lywuvo/2zfFRD6oGAAJ) which have thrown up more questions than answers. So I have posted this as a discussion. We've also been told we may have been under a negative SEO attack. We saw in SEMRush a large number of backlinks in October/November/December - at about the same time we disavowed around 1m backlinks (more on this below) but we can't see this reflected in Moz. We just got off a call with someone at Moz to try and work this out and he suggested we post here - so here goes... On 4th October for the search term 'example-term' we dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console). We also paid an external SEO consultant to review our site and see why we are dropping on the term 'example-term'. We've implemented everything and we're still dropping, the consultant thinks we may have been penalised in error (as we are a legitimate business and we're not trying to do anything untoward). In search console you could see from the graphs on the term we used to rank 1st and 2nd (you could go back 2 or 3 years and still see this). The thing we do find confusing is that we still rank very highly (if not 1st) for 'example-term + uk' and our brand name - which is very similar to 'example-term'. Timeline of events of changes: 2nd October 2018 midday: Added a CTA using something called Wisepops over the homepage - this was a full screen CTA for people to pledge on a project on our site helping with the tsunami in Indonesia (which may have had render blocking elements on). 4th October: we added a Google MyBusiness page showing our corporate headquarters as being in the UK (we did flag this on the Google MyBusiness forums and both people who responded said adding a MyBusiness page would not affect our drop in rankings). 4th October: dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console) 4th October: Removed the Wisepops popup 5th November: Server redirect so anything coming in on / was redirected to a page without a / 12th November: Removed around 200 junk pages (so old pages, test cms pages etc that were live and still indexed). Redirects from any 404s resolved 19th November: Updated site maps and video site maps to reflect new content and remove old content. Reviewed the whole site for duplicate meta tags and titles and updated accordingly with unique ones. Fixed issues in Google Search Console for Google search console for 404 and Mobile usability. Removed embedded YouTube video from homepage. 11th December: Removed old content and content seen as not useful from indexing; 'honey pot' pages, old blog, map pages, user profile pages, project page ‘junk pages which have little SEO value’ (comments, contact project owner, backers, report project) from indexing, added ‘no-follow’ to widgets linking back to us 3rd January 2019: Changed the meta title from to remove 'example-term' (we were concerned it may have been seen as keyword stuffing) 7th January: Disavow file updated to refuse a set of external sites powered by API linking to us (these were sites like example-term.externalsite.co.uk which used to link to us showing projects in local areas - our SEO expert felt may be seen as a ‘link farm’) 11th January: Updated our ‘About us’ page with more relevant content 15th January: Changed homepage title to include 'example-term' again, footer links updated to point to internal pages rather than linking off to Intercom, homepage ordering of link elements on homepage changed (so moving external rating site link further down the page, removing underlines on one item that was not a link, fixed and instance where two h1 tags were used), removed another set of external Subdomains (i.e. https://externalsite.sitename.co.uk) from our system (these were old sites we used to run for different clients which has projects in geographical areas displayed) 18th January: Added the word 'example-term' to key content pages We're at a loss as to why we are still dropping. Please note that the above changes were implemented after we'd been ranking fine for a couple years on the 'example-term' - the changes were to try and address the drop in ranking. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Nobody15554510997900 -
Will pillar posts create a duplication content issue, if we un-gate ebook/guides and use exact copy from blogs?
Hi there! With the rise of pillar posts, I have a question on the duplicate content issue it may present. If we are un-gating ebook/guides and using (at times) exact copy from our blog posts, will this harm our SEO efforts? This would go against the goal of our post and is mission-critical to understand before we implement pillar posts for our clients.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Olivia9540 -
Do Ghost Traffic/Spam Referrals factor into rankings, or do they just affect the CTR and Bounce Rate in Analytics?
So, by now I'm sure everyone that pays attention to their Analytics/GWT's (or Search Console, now) has seen spam referral traffic and ghost traffic showing up (Ilovevitaly.com, simple-share-buttons.com, semalt.com, etc). Here is my question(s)... Does this factor into rankings in anyway? We all know that click through rate and bounce rate (might) send signals to the algorithm and signal a low quality site, which could affect rankings. I guess what I'm asking is are they getting any of that data from Analytics? Since ghost referral traffic never actually visits my site, how could it affect the CTR our Bounce Rate that the algorithm is seeing? I'm hoping that it only affects my Bounce/CTR in Analytics and I can just filter that stuff out with filters in Analytics and it won't ever affect my rankings. But.... since we don't know where exactly the algorithm is pulling data on CTR and bounce rate, I guess I'm just worried that having a large amount of this spam/ghost traffic that I see in analytics could be causing harm to my rankings.... Sorry, long winded way of saying... Should I pay attention to this traffic? Should I care about it? Will it harm my site or my rankings at all? And finally... when is google going to shut these open back doors in Analytics so that Vitaly and his ilk are shut down forever?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seequs2 -
Best URL structure for SEO for Malaysian/Singapore site on .com.au domain
Hi there I know ideally i need a .my or .sg domain, however i dont have time to do this in the interim so what would be the best way to host Malaysian content on a www.domainname.com.au website? www.domainname.com.au/en-MY
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IsaCleanse
www.domainname.com.au/MY
domainname.com.au/malaysia
malaysia.domainname.com.au
my.domainname.com.au Im assuming this cant make the .com.au site look spammy but thought I'd ask just to be safe? Thanks in advance! 🙂0 -
Cloaking/Malicious Code
Does anybody have any experience with software for identifying this sort of thing? I was informed by a team we are working with that our website may have been compromised and I wanted to know what programs people have used to identify cloaking attempts and/or bad code. Thanks everybody!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Avoiding the "sorry we have no imagery here" G-maps error
Hi there, we recently did a redesign on a big site and added Gmaps locations to almost every page since we are related to Real State, Listings, Details, search results all have a map embedded. While looking at GWT I found that the top keywords on our site (which is in spanish) are the following. have here imagery sorry After a quick search I found out this is a Gmaps bug, when Google Bot accesses the Pages it throws an error out with this text repeated several times. If you do a search for "sorry we have no imagery here" you will see lots of sites with this issue. My question is, Is this affecting the overall SEO since Bots are actually crawling and indexing this hence its being reported by GWT, Should I cloak this to robots? Has anyone noticed this or has been able to fix it? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | makote0 -
Strange Pingback/Blog Comment Links
On one of my sites I've noticed some strange links from Google Webmaster Tools recent links feature. They are pingbacks/blog comments but they are using keyword anchor text and linking to my site. I know we are not doing this. Should I be concerned about this possibly being negative SEO? Here's a sample (be careful, shady site)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eyeflow0