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
-
Moz was unable to crawl your site on Jun 22, 2020\. We were unable to access your site due to a page timeout on your robots.txt, which prevented us from crawling the rest of your site.
Site: www.kpmg.us Getting robots.txt timeout fail since 02/29/20. We've checked our server logs and see no errors. Went through all the steps of the "Troubleshooter". Updated robots.txt to allow rogerbot full access: User-agent: rogerbot
Link Explorer | | KPMG-Search-Social
Disallow: Any ideas how to get roger to crawl my site????1 -
Is Moz's backlink checker.... just... not good?
Hey everyone! Can somebody explain to me why this keeps happening: Whenever I'm trying to backlink my competitors, I typically use RavenTools. Every time, without fail, if I put that same URL into Moz's Open Site Explorer - It gives me about 1/20th of what RavenTools shows me. Sometimes it literally comes up with 2 or 3 links total. Unfortunately, RavenTools has a cap on how many backlink checks you can perform in a month - so once I've used those up, I have to start using OSE... But, it just doesn't work. Does anyone else have this issue? Thanks!
Link Explorer | | TaylorRHawkins1 -
Is open site explorer the best way to find backlinks?
I know my websites have links from other sites, but I don't see it listed using the open explorer tool. perhaps the reputation of the external link is a factor? _Cindy
Link Explorer | | cceebar0 -
Domain Authority and PageRank Aren't Meshing
I'm seeing a very large discrepancy between the domain authority for a site I'm tracking and the PageRank. According to PageRank Checker the PageRank is "0". According to Moz, the domain authority is 57 and page authority for the domain below is in the 32. The domain is http://bwellness.massagetherapy.com/ Open Site Explorer shows 2 linking domains -- both have D.A. scores of 13. Please explain the discrepancy. Thanks in advance.
Link Explorer | | alankoen1230 -
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 -
Competitor analysis, why they rank so much better [ecommerce/Magento]
For a Dutch e-commerce website, we're having some issuse being found & ranked on important keywords. I have done a detailed view into the content & technical part (html) of our website and a competitor's site. Our site is www.hond.nl (hond is the Dutcn noun dog, the best domain we could get)
Link Explorer | | Canome79
Competitor: www.obobo.nl (no meaning at all) For searches for instance by dogfood (Dutch: "hondenvoer") we rank really bad while our competitor ranks really well. I've gone trouch the moz-tools intensively but can't figure out why. We got more content, more self-written texts, more incoming root-domain links etc. Any ideas were we could get a solution? Seems that our Splash pages are doing "ok" but especially Category pages are listing badly.0 -
Why does the number of the total external links and the followed linking root domains between Open site explorer and the campaign in Moz pro doesn't match?
Opensiteexplorer returns 52.473 total external links and 715 followed linking root domains while my campaign in Moz analytics return 35.899 total external links and 1092 followed linking root domains. Does anyone knows how this is possible?
Link Explorer | | ConversionMobstars0 -
Getting Different PA/DA for 'www' and 'non-www'?
Can anyone explain why we're seeing different DA/PA for our website when viewing in OSE for 'www' and 'non-www'? This is for our site whiteboardcreations.com Our 'www' is resolving at DA 37 | PA 47
Link Explorer | | WhiteboardCreations
Our 'non-www' is resolving at DA 37 | PA 44 Thanks! - Patrick0