Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
404 error - but I can't find any broken links on the referrer pages
-
Hi,
My crawl has diagnosed a client's site with eight 404 errors.
In my CSV download of the crawl, I have checked the source code of the 'referrer' pages, but can't find where the link to the 404 error page is. Could there be another reason for getting 404 errors?
Thanks for your help.
Katharine.
-
Are you getting any crawl errors in Google Webmaster tools?
-
Thank you. I will do.
-
Xenu looks good to me for that page as well. I'd do an-demand crawl for that page/site from http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test and if it's still showing up, send an email to help@seomoz.org so we can look and see if there's an error in the crawl software.
Thanks!
-
Thanks! At least I know I am not going blind! No, the CSV came from SEO Moz's report.
-
Hi Sarah,
I wasn't able to find errors on that page. Just to confirm the CSV of the crawl, is that coming from Google Webmasters?
Iain
-
Hi Iain,
Thanks for your help. The site was recrawled on the weekend after attempted updates had been made and I downloaded a new CSV. The broken links are still showing and I still can't find where they are on the page?!
Screaming Frog has not shown up any errors however.
Not sure what else to do! Were you able to see any broken links in the example URLs I posted above?
Many thanks,
Katharine.
-
When was the CSV download of the crawl taken? Have any changes been made to that page since?
Did the same 404 show up when you used Screaming Frog?
Thanks
Iain - Reload Media
-
I wondered if it would help if I got more specific.
For example, this 404 error link
http://www.soccer2000.com/store/X10498!ADI/CONDIVO%2B12%2B3/4%2BPANT
Is supposedly found on this page:
http://www.soccer2000.com/store/cat/APP/APPAREL
But I can't find it anywhere - any ideas why?
Thanks again.
-
Thanks! Fingers crossed this is what caused it.
-
Hi Katherine,
Try using Screaming Frog SEO software to crawl you site. That should pick up if you have a incorrect internal links.
For external links pointing to none existent pages, try Majestic SEO. It has the largest amount of link data (Sorry Open Site Explorer, but you know it's true).
Hope that helps
Iain - Reload Media
-
The crawl runs once a week, so maybe the broken links have been corrected since the last report. Wait for the next report and check if they still appear.
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
-
How can I stop a tracking link from being indexed while still passing link equity?
I have a marketing campaign landing page and it uses a tracking URL to track clicks. The tracking links look something like this: http://this-is-the-origin-url.com/clkn/http/destination-url.com/ The problem is that Google is indexing these links as pages in the SERPs. Of course when they get indexed and then clicked, they show a 400 error because the /clkn/ link doesn't represent an actual page with content on it. The tracking link is set up to instantly 301 redirect to http://destination-url.com. Right now my dev team has blocked these links from crawlers by adding Disallow: /clkn/ in the robots.txt file, however, this blocks the flow of link equity to the destination page. How can I stop these links from being indexed without blocking the flow of link equity to the destination URL?
Technical SEO | | UnbounceVan0 -
Can you use Screaming Frog to find all instances of relative or absolute linking?
My client wants to pull every instance of an absolute URL on their site so that they can update them for an upcoming migration to HTTPS (the majority of the site uses relative linking). Is there a way to use the extraction tool in Screaming Frog to crawl one page at a time and extract every occurrence of _href="http://" _? I have gone back and forth between using an x-path extractor as well as a regex and have had no luck with either. Ex. X-path: //*[starts-with(@href, “http://”)][1] Ex. Regex: href=\”//
Technical SEO | | Merkle-Impaqt0 -
How do I find which pages are being deindexed on a large site?
Is there an easy way or any way to get a list of all deindexed pages? Thanks for reading!
Technical SEO | | DA20130 -
Best way to handle pages with iframes that I don't want indexed? Noindex in the header?
I am doing a bit of SEO work for a friend, and the situation is the following: The site is a place to discuss articles on the web. When clicking on a link that has been posted, it sends the user to a URL on the main site that is URL.com/article/view. This page has a large iframe that contains the article itself, and a small bar at the top containing the article with various links to get back to the original site. I'd like to make sure that the comment pages (URL.com/article) are indexed instead of all of the URL.com/article/view pages, which won't really do much for SEO. However, all of these pages are indexed. What would be the best approach to make sure the iframe pages aren't indexed? My intuition is to just have a "noindex" in the header of those pages, and just make sure that the conversation pages themselves are properly linked throughout the site, so that they get indexed properly. Does this seem right? Thanks for the help...
Technical SEO | | jim_shook0 -
How Does Google's "index" find the location of pages in the "page directory" to return?
This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched. These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory". The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls. Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.
Technical SEO | | reidsteven750 -
Find broken links in Excel?
Hello, I have a large list of URL's in an excel sheet and I am looking for a way to check them for 404 errors. Please help! Adam
Technical SEO | | digitalops0 -
What is the best way to find stranded pages?
I have a client that has a site that has had a number of people in charge of it. All of these people have very different opinions about what should be on the site itself. When I look at their website on the server I see pages that do not have any obvious navigation to them. What is the best way to find out the internal linking structure of a site and see if these pages truly are stranded?
Technical SEO | | anjonr0 -
Do web pages have to be linked to a menu?
I have a situation where people search for terms like, say 1978 one dollar bill. Even though there never was a 1978 one dollar bill. I want to make a page to capture these searches but since there wasn't such a thing as a one dollar bill I don't want it connected to the rest of my content which is reality based. Does that make sense? Anyway, my question is, can I publish pages that aren't linked to my menu structure but that will be searchable or, am I going to have to figure out a way to make these oddball pages accessible through my menu?
Technical SEO | | Banknotes0