4xx (not found) errors seem spurious, caused by a "\" added to the URL
-
Hi SEOmoz folks
We're getting a lot of 404 (not found) errors in our weekly crawl.
However the weird thing is that the URLs in question all have the same issue.
They are all a valid URL with a backsalsh ("") added. In URL encoding, this is an extra %5C at the end of the URL.
Even weirder, we do not have any such URLs in our (Wordpress-based) website.
Any insight on how to get rid of this issue?
Thanks
-
No, Google Webmaster tools do not list an error here.
Its indeed an SEOmoz bug. Ryan, thanks for trying though!
-
My request is for a real link that I can click on and view the page.
In most cases where someone described an issue to me, either a key piece of information was left out or missed. If you cannot share that information, I understand. In the interest of being helpful, I wanted to ask.
It is entirely possible this is a crawler issue, but it is also possible the crawler is functioning perfectly and Google's crawler will produce the same result. That is my concern.
-
Well actualy I did already. The example I gave above is exactly that, only I replaced the real URL with "URL".
In a bit greater detail, the referring page is actually URL1 and this page contains the javascript
item = '
- text';
which produces 404 errors for URL2 in the SEOmoz crawl report.
-
It is entirely possible the issue is with the SEOmoz crawler. I would like to see it improved as well.
I am concerned the root issue may actually be with your site. Would you be willing to share an example of a link which is flagged in your report along with the referring page?
-
Thanks for the tips. After drilling down on the referer, this looks like an SEOmoz bug.
We are using a wordpress plugin called "collapsing archives" which creates LEGAL archive links with a javascript snippet like this:
item = '
- text';
As you can see this is totally legal javascript. But it seems SEOmoz is scanning the javascript without interpretation and picking up the escaped quotation mark ' after the URL and interpreting it as an additional \ at the end of the URL.
Since the plugin is behaving legally and works well - we want to keep using it. What's the chance that SEOmoz will fix the bug?
-
Many people do not realize when you add the backslash character, you change the URL. You can actually present a different web page for the URL with the trailing slash.
A popular cause of the problem is linking. If you check your weekly crawl report, there will be a column called Referrer. That is the source of the link. Check the referring page and find the link. Fix the link (i.e. remove the trailing slash) and the problem will go away on the next crawl. Of course, you want to determine how the link appeared and ensure it doesn't happen again.
-
If I had to have a guess I'd look into any javascript on the page that is perhaps adding or pointing to the URL with backslash.
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
-
Facebook URLs, Anchor Text
I have a client that is considering a facebook url change. For ease of explanation, let's say their currently existing URL is facebook.com/Company123. I've googled their currently existing facebook url and found a dozen or so websites that include the text, "facebook.com/Company123". But, these results don't include websites that have an anchor text of, for example, "Facebook" and a link pointing to facebook.com/Company123. Has anybody had success tracking down any/all websites that point to a specific Facebook url? I've tried Open Site Explorer, OpenLinkprofiler, RankSignals, and SEO SpyGlass to no avail. Thank you!
Moz Pro | | OMTAnno0 -
Magento Site "Title Missing or Empty"
Hi everyone . . ..bear with me as I am "noob". My moz analysis brought up a few "critical" issues, one of which was a missing or empty title for a page. That page is: http://www.thirdcoastsigns.com/sales/guest/form Which does not even appear to be a working page . . . so I'm at a bit of a loss ow to fix this. I suspect it's a little bit of SEO expertise and a little bit of Magento expertise. Thoughts and suggestions welcome! P.S. Look forward to my NEXT noob question about a bunch of pages I have flagged as "Pages with temporary redirects". Stay tuned!
Moz Pro | | damon12120 -
Multiple Countries, Same Language: Receiving Duplicate Page & Content Errors
Hello! I have a site that serves three English-speaking countries, and is using subfolders for each country version: United Kingdom: https://site.com/uk/ Canada: https://site.com/ca/ United States & other English-speaking countries: https://site.com/en/ The site displayed is dependent on where the user is located, and users can also change the country version by using a drop-down flag navigation element in the navigation bar. If a user switches versions using the flag, the first URL of the new language version includes a language parameter in the URL, like: https://site.com/uk/blog?language=en-gb In the Moz crawl diagnostics report, this site is getting dinged for lots of duplicate content because the crawler is finding both versions of each country's site, with and without the language parameter. However, the site has rel="canonical" tags set up on both URL versions and none of the URLs containing the "?language=" parameter are getting indexed. So...my questions: 1. Are the Duplicate Title and Content errors found by the Moz crawl diagnostic really an issue? 2. If they are, how can I best clean this up? Additional notes: the site currently has no sitemaps (XML or HTML), and is not yet using the hreflang tag. I intend to create sitemaps for each country version, like: .com/en/sitemap.xml .com/ca/sitemap.xml .com/uk/sitemap.xml I thought about putting a 'nofollow' tag on the flag navigation element, but since no sitemaps are in place I didn't want to accidentally cut off crawler access to alternate versions. Thanks for your help!
Moz Pro | | Allie_Williams0 -
How to track data from old site and new site with the same URL?
We are launching a new site within the next 48 hours. We have already purchased the 30 day trial and we will continue to use this tool once the new site is launched. Just looking for some tips and/or best practices so we can compare the old data vs. the new data moving forward....thank you in advance for your response(s). PB3
Moz Pro | | Issuer_Direct0 -
1 page crawled ... and other errors
1. Why is only one (1) page crawled every second time you crawl my site? 2. Why do your bot not obey the rules specified in the robots.txt? 3. Why does your site constantly loose connection to my facebook account/page? This means that when ever i want to compare performance i need to re-authorize, and therefor can not see any data until next time. Next time i also need to re-authorize ... 4. Why cant i add a competitor twitter account? What ever i type i get an "uh oh account cannot be tracked" - and if i randomly succeed, the account added never shows up with any data. It has been like this for ages. If have reported these issues over and over again. We are part of a large scandinavian company represented by Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. The companies are also part of a larger worldwide company spreading across England, Ireland, Continental Europe and Northern Europe. I count at least 10 accounts on Seomoz.org We, the Northern Europe (4 accounts) are now reconsidering our membership at seomoz.org. We have recently expanded our efforts and established a SEO-community in the larger scale businees spanning all our countries. Also in this community we are now discussing the quality of your services. We'll be meeting next time at 27-28th of june in London. I hope i can bring some answers that clarify the problem we have seen here on seomoz.org. As i have written before: I love your setup and you tools - when they work. Regretebly, that is only occasionally the case!
Moz Pro | | alsvik1 -
Does SEOmoz give a way to know what link on what page produces the 404 errors that SEOmoz is telling me I have??
SEOmoz gives me a report of 404 errors on my site. Do they give a way to know from what link on what page produces the error?
Moz Pro | | MeridianGroup0 -
Looking for a tool that can pull OSE stats for a bulk amount of URLs
I know that people have developed inhouse tools with the OSE API that can analyze thousands of URLs and pull metrics like PA, inbound links, etc. I need to analyze about 80k URLs and sort them by authority and I was hoping that someone could point me to a tool that can do this or let me use their tool. I'm willing to pay for access to it. We could build it inhouse, I imagine that it would be pretty easy, but our IT resources are stretched too thin right now.
Moz Pro | | Business.com0