Moz is reporting a broken link error but GWT is not
-
My latest Moz report is showing a 404 for: http://www.fateyes.com/how-will-googles-hummingbird-affect-your-search-ranking/”ht
(and showing the link this way with the characters after the last / which are not part of the page URL)Google Webmaster Tools says we have no errors. I'm wondering why there is this descrepancy and I'm wondering how I can track down where this link is originating from on our site. I've tried downloading screamingfrog and deeptrawl to no avail (java issues). I've also tried a couple of services online and installed Broken Link Checker plugin with no luck finding it.
Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!
-
I couldn't find it after some research. Maybe the error will dissaper after the next crawl. Normally you should be able to see the linking page. I'm sorry I couldn't help.
I did find some other things on your website you might want to fix. I just sent you a PM.
-
Thank you Everett. We are not using either of those plugins.
BUT! Your explanation about the double quotes got me thinking in the right direction. This blog post has an embedded infographic and when i was installing it, I had to correct a number of double quotes in the link to make the graphic appear. However, I didn't see that the attribution link had the double quotes also. So it's all solved now! Thank you again.
-
Thank you Robnnl. That makes sense about GWMT.
I would love to go to the linking page and solve it but I can't find where it's coming from. Clicking through to the error in Moz gives me no other information beyond the URL. It does not give me the page it's coming from. And if I don't know where the link is originating from I can't set a redirect.
Forgive me, but I don't understand how it could be an issue with an external site yet showing up as an error on my site. Moz is telling me it's on my site, aren't they?
-
%E2%80%9D is the UTF-8 encoding for the unicode character of the right double quotation marks (double quotes). This is a somewhat common issue with some Wordpress plugins. Please refer to the two posts below, especially if you are using either the Yoast's Google Analytics plug-in or a social plugin called Links Alpha.
http://moz.com/community/q/e2-80-9d-breaking-the-url-in-wordpress
http://moz.com/community/q/google-indexing-thousands-crazy-search-results-with-25253
As for the discrepancy, it could just be that Google's crawlers are a little "smarter" than Moz.com's in figuring out when unicode characters are used to represent double quote marks. No two crawlers are going to behave exactly the same.
-
In my experience GWMT is always a bit later with reporting errors while Moz is there to notify you in a week. You should click though to the error in Moz to see the linking page and solve it.
If the link is on an external site, check google analytics for visitors coming at that url with a second dimension "referrer" or "source". If you can't find and change the broken link, you can redirect it untill you find out where it and solve it later :).
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
-
Does Moz have a way to export full SERPs yet?
I don't like being restricted to tracking only three competitors' rankings so I'm wondering if I could just export the full SERPs like I can on Ahrefs and SEMrush.
Moz Bar | | QLP20040 -
GWT and internal link emulation
Hi, I have a gwt site - www.whatiswhere.com. I have tab control which emulates the menue. I am planning to put <a>links instead of text into tab labels to create internal links. I am thinking to add java script to onclick event of</a> <a>otherwise i will get to the new session of GWT site. What I want is to just change the tab but at the same time have a link for the crawler. Would my approach work? Will it be equivalent to non-follow link? Will it improve the ranking comparing to 'no link at all' case?</a> <a>Thanks, Andrei.</a>
Moz Bar | | Anazar_20010 -
Page Title showing Twice when I check it through Moz Bar
Hello Experts, I have a brand new website. And I know I have to do lot of things and make changes for better SEO. With that in mind, I recently installed Mozbar. I was checking one of my posts the other day and noticed Page Title is appearing twice in Mozbar.Please see the screenshot below. Could you please guide me what could be causing this? FYI, I have installed Yoast SEO Plugin. Also, I can see "Alt Text" is picking lot many words which are from other images or posts...Is there any way to customize that as well? KhP9y
Moz Bar | | techierichard0 -
Canonical in Moz crawl report
I'm wondering if the moz bot is seeing my rel="canonical" on my pages. There are 2 notices that are bothering me: Overly Dynamic URL Rel Canonical Overly Dynamic URL - This notice is being generated by urls with query strings. On the main page I have the rel="canonical" tag in the header. So every page with the query string has the canonical tag that points to the page that should be indexed. So my question...Why the notice? Isn't this being handled properly with the canonical tag? I know I can use my robots.txt or the tool in Google search console but is it really necessary when I have the canonical on every page? Here is one of the links that has the "Overly Dynamic URL" notice, as you can see the the canonical in the header points to the page without the query string: https://www.vistex.com/services/training/traditional-classroom/registration-form/?values=true&course-title=DMP101 – Data Maintenance Pricing – Business Processes&date=March 14, 2016 Rel Canonical - Every page in my report has this notice "Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical". I'm using the rel="canonical" tag on all of my pages by default. Is the report suggesting that I don't do this? Or is it suggesting that I should? Again...why the notice?
Moz Bar | | Brando160 -
How can I find duplicate pages from a Moz Crawl?
We have many duplicate pages that show up on the Moz Crawl, and we're trying to fix these but it's very difficult because I can't see a way to isolate the code where the duplicate is found. For instance, http://experiencemission.org/immersion/ is one of our main pages, and the crawl shows one duplicate of http://experiencemission.org/immersion. It appears that one of our staff manually edited the source code in one of our pages but forgot the trailing slash. This would be an easy fix but the problem is that this page is linked to internally on our website 2423 times, so it's next to impossible to find the code that is incorrect. We have many other pages with this same basic problem. We know we have duplicates, but it's next to impossible to isolate them. So my question is this: When viewing the Moz Crawl data is there any way to see where a specific duplicate page link is located on our website? Thanks for any and all help!
Moz Bar | | expmission0 -
GA snippets for subdomains and best tracking in MOZ
Hey there, I have a blog running at blog.URL.com. I need to add Google Analytics and I want to track the value of this subdomain as separate from the main URL. Can I do that? If I do a unique snippet in the header of the blog is that the right way to go? The main site is on an antiquated CMS system and will be converted over the next few months to a full on WP site, does that change anything long-term? Thanks in advance for your help. Cheers, Lisa
Moz Bar | | LisaBOS0 -
I'm checking keyword difficulty for two different sites. Would love to view the results by site instead of just one large list. Is that possible? Or would it just be easier to keep the lists separate in Excel and just import when I want an updated report?
I have keyword lists for two sites. Is there a way to label them in the keyword difficulty tool (List A, List B) so I can just view results for a particular site? Or do I need to run the report with List A, export results, delete those keywords, then run the report for List B?
Moz Bar | | JohnNovakLV0