Unfindable 404's
-
So I have noticed that my site has some really strange 404's that are only being linked to from internal links from the site.
When I go to the pages that Web master tools suggests I can't actaully find the link which is pointing to the 404. In that instance what do you do?Any help would be much appreciated
-
Thanks guys!
-
Adam, this happens to me quite a few times and I would highly recommend the suggestion by Matt... If you are not willing to invest in screaming frog and still need the full report then in that case I would suggest you to use XENU
-
Thats so much!
I don't have access to the paid version of screaming frog, so I'm just using Web Master Tools and a broken link app on Chrome....
But do you really think that is the best use of time? Wouldn't it just be more effective to just 301 it to a relevant page OR a generic 404 page?
Cheers
-
First, take it up with Screaming Frog to see if it's still an issue. http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
Once you know where your 404s are and where they're coming from, just use "view source" and search the supposedly broken code to find out what it's linked to. You can usually tell just by looking around the code and poking a bit to find out where. If not, give us a page and a 404 to look at and we'll do our best!
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
-
Generation 'child' sitemaps?
First off, am I correct in thinking that a 'child' sitemap is a sitemap of a subfolder and everything that sits under it, i.e. www.example.com/example If so, can someone give me a good recommendation for generation a free child sitemap please? Many thanks, Rhys
Technical SEO | | SwanseaMedicine0 -
Google's ability to crawl AJAX rendered content
I would like to make a change to the way our main navigation is currently rendered on our e-commerce site. Currently, all of the content that appears when you click a navigation category is rendering on page load. This is currently a large portion of every page visit’s bandwidth and even the images are downloaded even if a user doesn’t choose to use the navigation. I’d like to change it so the content appears and is downloaded only IF the user clicks on it, I'm planning on using AJAX. As that is the case it wouldn’t not be automatically on the site(which may or may not mean Google would crawl it). As we already provide a sitemap.xml for Google I want to make sure this change would not adversely affect our SEO. As of October this year the Webmaster AJAX crawling doc. suggestions has been depreciated. While the new version does say that its crawlers are smart enough to render AJAX content, something I've tested, I'm not sure if that only applies to content injected on page load as opposed to in click like I'm planning to do.
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Strange URL's for client's site
We just picked up a new client and I've been doing some digging around on their site. They have quite the wide variety of URL's that make for a rather confusing experience. One of the milder examples is their "About" page. Normally I would expect something along the lines of: www.website.com/about I see: www.website.com/default.asp?Page=About I'm typically a graphic designer and know basically nothing about code, but I just assume this has something funky to do with how their website was constructed. I'm assuming this isn't particularly SEO friendly, but it doesn't seem too bad. Until I got to another section of their site. It's a section that logically should look like: www.website.com/training/public-seminars It's: www.website.com/default.asp?Page=MT&Area=Seminars&Sub=MRM Now that's nonsensical to me! Normally if a client has terrible URL's, I'd say let's do some redirects, but I guess I'm a little intimidated by these. Do the URL's have to be structured like this for some reason? Am I missing some important area of coding here? However, the most bizarre example is a link back to their website from yellowpages.com. Where normally I would expect it to lead to their homepage, I get this bizarre-looking thing: http://website1-px.rtrk.com/?utm_source=ReachLocal&utm_medium=PPC&utm_campaign=AssetManagement&reference_id=15&publisher=yellowpages&placement=ypwebsitemip&action_target=listing_website And as you browse through the site, that strange domain stays. For example the About page is now: http://website1-px.rtrk.com/default.asp?Page=About I would try to google this but I have no idea where to even start! What is going on with these links? Will we be able to fix them to something presentable without breaking their website?
Technical SEO | | everestagency0 -
Odd 404 pages
Evening all, I've performed a Screaming Frog technical crawl of a site, and it's returning links like this as 404s: http://clientsite.co.uk/accidents-caused-by-colleagues/js/modernizr-2.0.6.min.js Now, I recognise that Modernizr is used for detecting features in the user's browser - but why would it have created an indexed page that no longer exists? Would you leave them as is? 410 them? Or do something else entirely? Thanks for reading, I look forward to hearing your thoughts! Kind regards, John.
Technical SEO | | Muhammad-Isap0 -
Rebranding: 404 to homepage?
Hello all!
Technical SEO | | JohnPalmer
I did a rebranding, [Domain A] -> [Domain B]. what to do with all the 404 pages? 1. [Domain A (404)] -> [Domain B (homepage)]?
2. [Domain A (404)] -> [Domain B (404 page + same url) - for example: xixix.com/page/bla What do you think ?0 -
Correct linking to the /index of a site and subfolders: what's the best practice? link to: domain.com/ or domain.com/index.html ?
Dear all, starting with my .htaccess file: RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | inlinear
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.inlinear.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://inlinear.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://inlinear.com/ [R=301,L] 1. I redirect all URL-requests with www. to the non www-version...
2. all requests with "index.html" will be redirected to "domain.com/" My questions are: A) When linking from a page to my frontpage (home) the best practice is?: "http://domain.com/" the best and NOT: "http://domain.com/index.php" B) When linking to the index of a subfolder "http://domain.com/products/index.php" I should link also to: "http://domain.com/products/" and not put also the index.php..., right? C) When I define the canonical ULR, should I also define it just: "http://domain.com/products/" or in this case I should link to the definite file: "http://domain.com/products**/index.php**" Is A) B) the best practice? and C) ? Thanks for all replies! 🙂
Holger0 -
Just read Travis Loncar's YouMoz post and I have a question about Pagination
This was a brilliant post. I have a question about Pagination on sites that are opting to use Google Custom Search. Here is an example of a search results page from one of the sites I work on: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/search-return?q=countryman I notice in the source code of sequential pages that the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags are not used. I also noticed that the URL does not change when clicking on the numbers for the subsequent pages of the search results. Also, the canonical tag of every subsequent page looks like this: Are you thinking what I'm thinking? All of our Google Custom Search pages have the same canonical tag....Something's telling me this just can't be good. Questions: 1. Is this creating a duplicate content issue? 2. If we need to include rel="prev" and rel="next" on Google Custom Search pages as well as make the canonical tag accurate, what is the best way to implement this? Given that searchers type in such a huge range of search terms, it seems that the canonical tags would have to be somehow dynamically generated. Or, (best case scenario!) am I completely over-thinking this and it just doesn't matter on dynamically driven search results pages? Thanks in advance for any comments, help, etc.
Technical SEO | | danatanseo1 -
How to avoid 404 errors when taking a page off?
So... We are running a blog that was supposed to have great content. Working at SEO for a while, I discovered that is too much keyword stuffing and some SEO shits for wordpress, that was supposed to rank better. In fact. That worked, but I'm not getting the risk of getting slaped by the Google puppy-panda. So we decided to restard our blog from zero and make a better try. So. Every page was already ranking in Google. SEOMoz didn't make the crawl yet, but I'm really sure that the crawlers would say that there is a lot of 404 errors. My question is: can I avoid these errors with some tool in Google Webmasters in sitemaps, or shoud I make some rel=canonicals or 301 redirects. Does Google penalyses me for that? It's kinda obvious for me that the answer is YES. Please, help 😉
Technical SEO | | ivan.precisodisso0