Moz is returning some of my pages as 404 but why when they are live?

[gezzagregz]

hi guys,

i would appreciate some advice on this.

here are some example pages where i am getting a 404 status;
http://www.colourbanners.co.uk/printed-boards/correx-boards.html
http://www.colourbanners.co.uk/printed-boards/foamex-boards.html

There are quite a few, but thes a live pages so why is this happening? Also our site has dropped in the SERPS, i was wondering if this has something to do with it?

many thanks

Gerry

[ChiarynMiranda]

Hey Gerry,

Sorry for the delayed reply. The Q&A questions only get directly assigned to the Help Team if they are marked as a product support question.

I just looked into the campaign associated with this account and I don't see that we have been reporting any 404 errors on this site, but I do see that the campaign was just created on Nov 26th, so it seems that you may have deleted and recreated the campaign. Since we are no longer reporting any 404s, I can't look into the issue directly now, but if you run into this issue again, I would recommend sending an email directly to help@moz.com so we can investigate what may be causing the issue.

Let me know if you have any other questions in the meantime.

Chiaryn
Moz Help Team

[FedeEinhorn]

Most likely is a Moz error. As far as I know, Roger (Moz crawler) automatically adjusts the speed depending on the site performance, I guess watching for the response times, as they crawled sites too fast, they could be either bring down your server or have their IPs blocked as a security measure. It does that automatically. However, sometimes our Websites can become slow and therefore instead of a 200 status code (success load) it gets a 404 as the server isn't responding.

Are you behind a shared server? Were you able to see Roger crawling your site? There are some free services that allows you to make some stress tests to see if your server is responding well, even under pressure.

This shouldn't have anything to do with the fact that the pages are not showing in Google, but, if you are having server issues with regular downtimes, Google may remove pages that they consider gone from your site. Google already said that a couple of 404 errors isn't enough to remove a page from their index, however, a 404 over 3 - 5 days might.

Have you verified your site on GWT? They do show crawling errors, and if they are also getting 404s they should appear there.

Hope that helps!