WebMaster Tools keeps showing old 404 error but doesn't show a "Linked From" url. Why is that?
-
Hello Moz Community.
I have a question about 404 crawl errors in WebmasterTools, a while ago we had an internal linking problem regarding some links formed in a wrong way (a loop was making links on the fly), this error was identified and fixed back then but before it was fixed google got to index lots of those malformed pages. Recently we see in our WebMaster account that some of this links still appearing as 404 but we currently don't have that issue or any internal link pointing to any of those URLs and what confuses us even more is that WebMaster doesn't show anything in the "Linked From" tab where it usually does for this type of errors, so we are wondering what this means, could be that they still in google's cache or memory? we are not really sure.
If anyone has an idea of what this errors showing up now means we would really appreciate the help. Thanks.
-
Hi Jane, thanks for the follow up. Every time we see errors showing up in WMT (mainly 404's) we remove the URL's right away and indeed we see the errors going down every 4-5 days (under HTML improvements).
I am just surprised, that if we would not use the URL removal tool, how long it takes for Google to actually remove 404's from their index. I know the higher the PR, the more likely they crawl more often and the faster they remove these 404's I guess, but still.
-
Hi again,
Four months seems abnormally long, but it could have something to do with how many 404s are are - 400 is pretty high. Is this number at least going down every few weeks in WMT?
Cheers,
Jane
-
hi Jane, we've solved the cause of these errors more than 4 months ago at this point. There is no path to these urls anymore, but they keep showing up so it takes Google pretty long to clean up. And our estimate is that there about 400 more of these 404 errors so we still have some time to go I guess.
-
Hi,
How long have these errors been appearing since you fixed the issue? It could be a case of Google looking for URLs on the site that it has seen in the past, even though there is no path to them anymore. With the pathway gone, it should stop looking, but I'm curious how long the issue has been fixed for?
-
I hate to speculate on anything involving SEO, but I've always taken those 404s as visits Google has been able to grab data for. If Webmasters is able to catch the data for a visit to a 404, it'll let you know about it.
What lead me to this cringe assumption cringe was how similar those 404s were to existing pages, like someone tried to type in a URL and got it wrong, or deleted some of it and hit "enter".
Take the info for what it's worth, which isn't fact, just an idea to get you rolling.
-
I've had those too and they are quiet annoying (love seeing 0 errors hehe). I just mark and fixed and hope it doesn't show up again (usually stops appearing after doing that once or twice).
If anyone has another other insight into this, please share!
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 encountered an error on one or more pages on your site" Error
I have been receiving this error for a while: "Moz encountered an error on one or more pages on your site" It's a Multi-Lingual Wordpress website, the robots.txt is set to allow crawlers on all links and I have followed the same process for other website I've done yet I'm receiving this error for this site.
Technical SEO | | JustinZimri0 -
How to explain "No Return Tags" Error from non-existing page?
In the Search Console of our Google Webmaster account we see 3 "no return tags" errors. The attached screenshot shows the detail of one of these errors. I know that annotations must be confirmed from the pages they are pointing to. If page A links to page B, page B must link back to page A, otherwise the annotations may not be interpreted correctly. However, the originating URL (/#!/public/tutorial/website/joomla) doesn't exist anymore. How could these errors still show up? Screenshot%202016-07-11%2017.36.27.png?dl=0
Technical SEO | | Maximuxxx0 -
"5XX (Server Error)" - How can I fix this?
Hey Mozers! Moz Crawl tells me I am having an issue with my Wordpress category - it is returning a 5XX error and i'm not sure why? Can anyone help me determine the issue? Crawl Issues and Notices for: http://www.refusedcarfinance.com/news/category/news We found 1 crawler issue(s) for this page. High Priority Issues 1 5XX (Server Error) 5XX errors (e.g., a 503 Service Unavailable error) are shown when a valid request was made by the client, but the server failed to complete the request. This can indicate a problem with the server, and should be investigated and fixed.
Technical SEO | | RocketStats0 -
Hreflang Tags - error: 'en' - no return tags
Hello, We have recently implemented Hreflang tags to improve the findability of our content in each specific language. However, Webmaster tool is giving us this error... Does anyone know what it means and how to solve it? Here I attach a screenshot: http://screencast.com/t/a4AsqLNtF6J Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | Kilgray0 -
GWT giving me 404 errors based on old and deleted site map
I'm getting a bunch of 404 crawl errors in my Google Webmaster Tools because we just moved our site to a new platform with new URL structure. We 301 redirected all the relevant pages. We submitted a new site map and then deleted all the site maps to the old website url structure. However, google keeps crawling the OLD urls and reporting back the 404 errors. It says that the website is linking to these 404 pages via an old outdated sitemap (which if you goto shows a 404 as well, so it's not as if Google is reading these old site maps now). Instead it's as if Google has cached the old sitemap but continues to use it to crawl these non-existent pages. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
Why are my URL's changing
My rankings suddenly dropped and when trying to understand why I realized that nearly all images in Google's cached version of my site were missing. In the actual site they appear but in the cached version they don't. I noticed that most of the images had a ?6b5830 at the end of the URL and these were the images that were not showing. I am hoping that I found the reason for the drop in rankings. Maybe since Google cannot see a lot of the content it decided not to rank it as well (particularly since it seems to happen on thousands of pages). This is a cached version of my site I am using the following plugins that might be causing it: Yoasts SEO plugin, W3 total cache. Does anyone know what is causing ?6b5830 to be added to the end of most of my URL's? Could this be the reason for the ranking drop? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | JillB20130 -
Webmaster tools
Hello, My sites are showing odd "links to your site" data in WMT. Its not showing any links to the homepages and reduced links for other pages. Anyone else seeing this? Penguin refresh maybe?
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Canonical tags pointing at old URLs that have been 301'd
I have a site which has various white label sites with the same content on each. I have canonical tags on the white label sites pointing to the main site. I have changed some URLs on the main site and 301'd the previous URL to the new ones. Is it ok to have the canonicals pointing to the old URLs that now have a 301 redirect on them.
Technical SEO | | BeattieGroup0