On Link Analysis tab I my best pages are 301 and 404 pages.
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I looked on my redirrect file and found that /* redirects to /v/404.asp.
However if you look below at the link analysis the 404 page is getting a 404 error.
The homepage ecowindchimes.com/ is getting a 301 (but I don't know where it is going to).
The third one is also redirected.1. [No Data] ecowindchimes.com/ ||| 301 ||| 2 ||| 36 2.
2. [No Data] ecowindchimes.com/v/404.asp ||| 404 ||| 2 ||| 34 3. [No Data]
3. ecowindchimes.com/index.html?lang=en-us&target=d2.html ||| 301 ||| 1 ||| 33
So I have 2 questions: 1) should this be fixed? and 2) how?
This is a volusion site and I believe the "catchall" redirect was done by them
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Answered in order, Stephen:
1. Normally, the fact that ecowindchimes.com/ is getting redirected is a good thing. But in this case, there's a problem with how it's been done. If you want to see where it's redirecting to, just enter that exact address in your browser's address bar and watch what happens to the address. It will change to www.ecowindchimes.com/default.asp. Done correctly, it should redirect to www.ecowindchimes.com (no default.asp extension)
This is called canonicalisation and it's designed to make sure your site's pages only get indexed under 1 URL. As far as the search engines are concerned, ecowindchimes.com/ and www.ecowindchimes.com/ are separate sites, even though the pages themselves are the same. By redirecting one to the other, you remove this problem.
The problem here is that www.ecowindchimes.com/default.asp is yet another way to refer to what is simply the home page of your site. This means that now, instead of www.ecowindchimes.com/ and www.ecowindchimes.com/ being duplicates of each other you have www.ecowindchimes.com and www.ecowindchimes.com**/default.asp** being dupes of each other. This needs to be corrected in your .htaccess file using 301 redirects.
You need to make ecowindchimes.com/ use a proper canonical redirect to www.ecowindchimes.com. This will catch ALL version of your pages that start without the www and redirect them to the correct URL with the www. (You'll need to delete the existing redirect as it's incorrect)
Then you need to 301-redirect www.ecowindchimes.com/default.asp directly to www.ecowindchimes.com/.
2. I've answered your question # 2 as fully as I can on your followup question. in short, your Volusion system is faking that 404 status as a hack to deal with the fact they don't handle 404 errors in the normal way. The page exists fine and that particular error can be ignored.
3. For your last question, this demonstrates why the hacked method for 404s being used is a problem. URLs that should be 404s will show up looking like 301 redirects instead, because of the hack in use.
To test this URL, again just put it in your address bar and watch where it gets redirected to. In this case, it's going to your 404 page (See answer to your followup question as linked above for explanation why this happening)
So, yes you need to try to fix these kinds of errors. It's saying that somewhere, there is a page linking to ecowindchimes.com/index.html?lang=en-us&target=d2.html. That is a URL from your old site before you migrated to the Volusion system. It likely means that there are pages on another web sites still linking to your old page addresses. It's also possible these are outdated links from within your own pages.
By entering that URL in the Wayback Machine I can see that it was for a page for Gracenote windchimes, so you'll want to redirect it to your Gracenotes category page.
If you want to figure out what pages those broken links are coming from, you can use Webmaster Tools 404 error report and SEOmoz's 404 error report as starting points. NOTE! You'll need to actually download the SEOmoz report as a CSV in order to see the Referrer column at the right side of the report.
Hope all that helps, more than confuses? If anything's not clear, be sure to holler.
Paul
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