Repeated mysterious 404's from ancient site structure killing my rankings
-
Several years ago I changed my site structure to go from a flash based site to a blog based wordpress site. After doing so I went from page 1 to page 30 for my relevant search terms. I have employed people to help me track down the problem and I believe that they have narroed it to the existance of 404's being created from some unknown internal source. I have been for years getting links like this...
<colgroup><col width="792"></colgroup>
||
......regularly showing in webmaster tools, (this is from a top pages report from MOZ where there are hundreds also shown).
When I do a moz crawl of the site, none of these links show up. Therefore I have no way of finding the source of these links (they also do not show me the source in WMT as they should).
We have completely cleared the site and rebuilt it and although it is still only a couple of weeks in it still does not appear to have stopped them.
Does anyone have any way of helping me find the source of these mysterious 404's?
-
Why bother trying to clean anything up? If somewhere out there there are links to your domain, and they're 404'ing, just 301 them to new pages on your site! Capture that link juice, don't let it run out
-
Thanks for your reply EEE3
The ancient link says it is linked from another non existent ancient page that no longer exists and it is always first crawled and last detected on the day that it arrives.
eg. last crawled 4/23/14, first detected 4/23/14
http://www.dfphotographer.com.au/brisbaneweddingphotographer/2011/03/st-kilda-wedding......
linked from
http://dfphotographer.com.au/brisbaneweddingphotographer/index.php/2011/03/st-kilda-wedding.....
and
http://dfphotographer.com.au/brisbaneweddingphotographer/2011/03/st-kilda-wedding....
-
Thanks for your response Keri,
Being staff can you please tell me where does the top pages data come from? Is it from crawling my site (like a google spider) or is it sourced from google or somewhere else. How often is that data refreshed?
In answer to your response, I have tried both screaming frog and xenu and my nice clean site structure is all it picks up. None of the ancient messy site structure appears.
Have been through the list of domains looking for an old sitemap or something similar that may have been scraped off my site but after a long and arduous task could not locate any reference to any of these links that show up in top pages and webmaster tools (which says they are linked from other ancient pages - which I will expand on below)
We have looked at all the usual suspects - old sitemaps, plugins and rebuilt the site just in case we missed anything that was lingering around. I have had really good people looking at it who continue to do so it just never seems to go away.
-
In Webmaster Tools, when you click on the 404 and the popup window appears, what is showing in the Linked from tab?
-
I edited the post so the URLs didn't run together. Still not perfect, but a little easier to read.
I'm not exactly sure where those links are coming from. You might run a tool like Xenu Link Sleuth or Screaming Frog on your site to see if there is an internal linking widget gone awry. The other thought I have is to look at Open Site Explorer to see what sites are linking to you and if they're linking to any of those pages.
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
-
Do other sites linking to my page with a low domain authority affect my rankings?
Hello, my page authority 30, I see other page with an authority of 21 for example linking to us. Is this good or bad, does this affect our ranking? A lot of these don't have anchor text, I'm guessing we should reach out to these webmaster to include anchor text with the keywords we want to drive traffic to this page or make as descriptive as possible? Thanks! Laura
Link Explorer | | lauramrobinson320 -
Use Open Site Explorer and the Keyword Difficulty Tool to find your competitors' keywords and how they're ranking for them. Get your Daily SEO Fix!
In today's Daily SEO Fix, Jacki walks through using Open Site Explorer's anchor text report to find keywords your competitors may be targeting, and how to use the Keyword Difficulty Tool to tease out what's helping them rank. Watch "Keyword Research with OSE and the Keyword Difficulty Tool" now! The Daily SEO Fix is an ongoing series of Moz tool tips and tricks in under 2 minutes. To watch all of our videos so far, and to subscribe to future ones, make sure to visit the Daily SEO Fix channel on YouTube. If you'd like a more in-depth guide to using the Keyword Difficulty Tool and its Full SERP Analysis Report for competitive insights, check out Cyrus Shepard's excellent Moz Academy video on the subject.
Link Explorer | | MattRoney1 -
What's the Story on Mozscape Updates?
Hey gang, As you may be aware, we were considerably late with our last index release. You have my sincere apologies for that and the apologies of the entire team. In the interest of transparency, I want to try to explain what's been going on. Since stepping down as CEO, I've been asked to take on a few roles in the company. One of those is product architect (basically the product owner) of our Big Data team, who produces the Mozscape link index. For several years, that team has been almost exclusively focused on getting us closer to a near real-time indexing system that does not have scalability issues. Mozscape is currently smaller than our major competitors, and we're also often slower. Our metrics (PA, DA, MozRank, MozTrust, Spam Score, Social Data, etc) have been the unique value we provide, but it's not enough. We need to be competitive on size and freshness. Building a raw link index (without processed metrics like PA/DA et al) is hard, but it's possible. Building a link index with those metrics is really tricky, and requires computer science knowledge and skills far beyond the scope of my understanding. That's what our team's been working on, and they've made some progress, but it's been slow, hampered by unknown unknowns, and materially hurt by a lack of experienced talent we can hire to help (we've had open job posts for years now). In the meantime, our historic Mozscape index structure keeps encountering challenges - this latest round is still somewhat unexplained (we believe there's hardware issues compounded by how the system is architected to handle large domains, but there may be other issues). The team's struggled to split time between keeping the old Mozscape running and hunkering down to finish the new system. I'm trying to help them balance things as best I can, and we're going to be putting effort toward making sure we get index releases out on time. However, to do that, we'll need to scale down size, and then rebuild back up. We think we can do this while also improving the prioritization of which links we crawl (e.g. deeper on important domains that link out, less so on deep pages that don't link anywhere) so the index overall improves. However, I don't want to minimize the risks - we may have some slow updates, some smaller indices, and some less-than-ideal data in the next one or two indices while we work to remedy this issue. I HOPE we don't, and that things actually get better immediately, but we can't promise that until the work gets finished. TL;DR - Mozscape V2 is in development and will let us as big and faster as any link index. In the meantime, current Mozscape's having issues & we're making smaller indices in an attempt to diagnose and repair. As always, thanks for your understanding, continued support, and if you have any questions, feel free to leave them below. I realize that this level of service/product quality is NOT OK, and I'm doing everything in my power to fix it.
Link Explorer | | randfish8 -
Open Site Explorer Top Pages https Title tag issue
Hello, everybody. I've noticed this strange thing in Top Pages reporting of Open Site Explorer. If i do a report for any website which doesn't have security certificate installed, such as http://www.hyperlinksmedia.com I get normal results, with title tag shown for every page, but, if i do a report for website with Security certificate, such as https://www.hyperlinksmedia.com, report is coming back for non-secure URL version (http:...), so, it says "No Title" for any pages. I wonder, if it influence PA and DA scores. Although, if i run full crawl test, then i shows all meta and title tags for SSL version of a website's url. Thanks!
Link Explorer | | seomozinator0 -
Psst Did you see Open Site Explorer's New Link Building Opportunities Section??
Check out Rand's blog post about it for all the details: http://moz.com/blog/open-site-explorers-new-link-building-opportunities-section. We'd love for you to check it out and leave us your feedback! Thanks,
Link Explorer | | jennita
Jen3 -
What could have caused Total links to drop from 860,000 to 93,127 in Open Site Explorer?
I've been monitoring root domain total links for a website over the past couple of months and recently noticed a significant drop at the beginning of July.Specifically, I have been tracking the total links for the root domain using open site explorer. Since April the total number or links has been fluctuating among 860,000 - 865,000. However at the beginning of July, they dropped to 93,127 and now sit only at 110,831.This is a very significant and troubling decrease and I am wondering what the cause could be? Did Moz change the way they report/determine the total link metrics? It is especially baffling since neither total internal nor total external links have seen significant decreases.
Link Explorer | | sixspokemedia0 -
OSE unavailable and Rank Tracker not refreshing
I tried to submit a help ticket, but the help tickets also are not working! OSE for at least the last 12 hours has been returning Unavailable. Also, Rank Tracker never updates and just endlessly spins. Can someone shed some light on the issue and when the solution will be implemented? Thank you
Link Explorer | | DJ1231 -
OnPage Grader double counting keywords on responsive site (hidden vs visible)
FYI - it appears that if you have a responsive site that has blocks of text that are duplicated, but Hidden or Visible depending on the screen width, that On-Page Grader will count any keywords in that text twice. I have text shown in one location to Desktop users that needed to be re-located to a different part of the page for Tablet and Phone users to keep the layout nice. And my OP Grader keyword count doesn't match what I saw on the page doing Ctrl-F to find the keywords, unless you count the Hidden text. (not hidden like cloaking or some black hat thing - just not displayed on certain devices) I guess On Page Grader just reads the source code and ignores whether the text is hidden or visible. It would be nice if it read the code as if it was a Desktop device. (suggestion for Moz staff) Does anybody know if Google also ignores device dependent Hidden vs Visible areas???
Link Explorer | | GregB1230