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.
Why is my Crawl Report Showing Thousands of Pages that Do Not Exist?
-
Hi,
I just downloaded a Crawl Summary Report for a client's website. I am seeing THOUSANDS of duplicate page content errors. The overwhelming majority of them look something like this:
This page doesn't exist and results in a 404 page. Why are these pages showing up? How do I get rid of them? Are they endangering the health of my site as a whole?
Thank you,
Jenna
<colgroup><col width="1051"></colgroup>
| | -
Hi Jenna,
It's not so much the fact you have 404 pages that is the problem for SEO, but rather the fact your site is creating a problem for the search engines to crawl the site correctly and efficiently since they are getting caught in an endless loop. This can be a problem because the crawlers may get caught in the endless loop and just give up on your site and leave, which means the search engines may not be able to access the rest of the pages on your site and may have a negative impact on your rankings as a whole. One of the most important parts of SEO is to make your website as "friendly" to the search engines as possible so if they caught in endless loops then that is definitely not ideal. Hope that helps!
Patrick
-
Hi Streamline -
Thanks for your help thus far. Could you elaborate on some of the SEO challenges this presents? After a bit of research, I'm seeing people say that having hundreds or thousands of 404s are okay, if they are in fact non-existant pages. I'm not that well educated on this, so just looking for a bit of clarification.
I will look into the relative URL issue. I just recently took over the work on this site, and I'm still digging in to what the original web developer created.
Jenna
-
It looks like the crawler is being caught in an endless loop, most likely a result of using relative URLs somewhere on your site. Yes, this is a problem for the site as a whole so I highly recommend implementing absolute URLs throughout the entire site.
Edit - I just looked at your site and this is exactly what it is. The links in your navigation are relative, such as "<a <="" span="">href="</a>../development/default.aspx"" so just change it to absolute URLs such as http://www.yoursite.com/development/default.aspx and it should fix the problem.
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
-
My last site crawl shows over 700 404 errors all with void(0 added to the ends of my posts/pages.
Hello, My last site crawl shows over 700 404 errors all with void(0 added to the ends of my posts/pages. I have contacted my theme company but not sure what could have done this. Any ideas? The original posts/pages are still correct and working it just looks like it did duplicates and added void(0 to the end of each post/page. Questions: There is no way to undo this correct? Do I have to do a redirect on each of these? Will this hurt my rankings and domain authority? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks, Wade
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neverenoughmusic.com0 -
Few pages without SSL
Hi, A website is not fully secured with a SSL certificate.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdenaSEO
Approx 97% of the pages on the website are secured. A few pages are unfortunately not secured with a SSL certificate, because otherwise some functions on those pages do not work. It's a website where you can play online games. These games do not work with an SSL connection. Is there anything we have to consider or optimize?
Because, for example when we click on the secure lock icon in the browser, the following notice.
Your connection to this site is not fully secured Can this harm the Google ranking? Regards,
Tom1 -
Paginated Pages Which Shouldnt' Exist..
Hi I have paginated pages on a crawl which shouldn't be paginated: https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs My crawl shows: <colgroup><col width="377"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=2 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=3 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=4 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=5 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=6 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=7 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=8 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=9 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=10 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=11 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=12 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=13 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=14 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=15 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=16 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=17 | Where is this coming from? Thank you0 -
Multiple pages optimised for the same keywords but pages are functionally different and visually different
Hi MOZ community! We're wondering what the implications would be on organic ranking by having 2 pages, which have quite different functionality were optimised for the same keywords. So, for example, one of the pages in question is
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TrueluxGroup
https://www.whichledlight.com/categories/led-spotlights
and the other page is
https://www.whichledlight.com/t/led-spotlights both of these pages are basically geared towards the keyword led spotlights the first link essentially shows the options for led spotlights, the different kind of fittings available, and the second link is a product search / results page for all products that are spotlights. We're wondering what the implications of this could be, as we are currently looking to improve the ranking for the site particularly for this keyword. Is this even safe to do? Especially since we're at the bottom of the hill of climbing the ranking ladder of this keyword. Give us a shout if you want any more detail on this to answer more easily 🙂0 -
How long takes to a page show up in Google results after removing noindex from a page?
Hi folks, A client of mine created a new page and used meta robots noindex to not show the page while they are not ready to launch it. The problem is that somehow Google "crawled" the page and now, after removing the meta robots noindex, the page does not show up in the results. We've tried to crawl it using Fetch as Googlebot, and then submit it using the button that appears. We've included the page in sitemap.xml and also used the old Google submit new page URL https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url Does anyone know how long will it take for Google to show the page AFTER removing meta robots noindex from the page? Any reliable references of the statement? I did not find any Google video/post about this. I know that in some days it will appear but I'd like to have a good reference for the future. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabioricotta-840380 -
How long does google take to show the results in SERP once the pages are indexed ?
Hi...I am a newbie & trying to optimize the website www.peprismine.com. I have 3 questions - A little background about this : Initially, close to 150 pages were indexed by google. However, we decided to remove close to 100 URLs (as they were quite similar). After the changes, we submitted the NEW sitemap (with close to 50 pages) & google has indexed those URLs in sitemap. 1. My pages were indexed by google few days back. How long does google take to display the URL in SERP once the pages get indexed ? 2. Does google give more preference to websites with more number of pages than those with lesser number of pages to display results in SERP (I have just 50 pages). Does the NUMBER of pages really matter ? 3. Does removal / change of URLs have any negative effect on ranking ? (Many of these URLs were not shown on the 1st page) An answer from SEO experts will be highly appreciated. Thnx !
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PepMozBot0 -
Could you use a robots.txt file to disalow a duplicate content page from being crawled?
A website has duplicate content pages to make it easier for users to find the information from a couple spots in the site navigation. Site owner would like to keep it this way without hurting SEO. I've thought of using the robots.txt file to disallow search engines from crawling one of the pages. Would you think this is a workable/acceptable solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gregelwell0 -
Generating 404 Errors but the Pages Exist
Hey I have recently come across an issue with several of a sites urls being seen as a 404 by bots such as Xenu, SEOMoz, Google Web Tools etc. The funny thing is, the pages exist and display fine. This happens on many of the pages which use the Modx CMS, but the index is fine. The wordpress blog in /blog/ all works fine. The only thing I can think of is that I have a conflict in the htaccess, but troubleshooting this is difficult, any tool I have found online seem useless. Have tried to rollback to previous versions but still does not work. Anyone had any experience of similar issues? Many thanks K.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Found0