Why are these URL's suddenly appearing in WMT?
-
One of our clients has suddenly experienced a sudden increase in crawl errors for smart phones overnight for pages which no longer exist and there are no links to these pages according to Google.
There is no evidence as to why Google would suddenly start to crawl these pages as they have not existed for over 5 years, but it does come after a new site design has been put live. Pages do not appear to be in the index when a site search is used.
There was a similar increase in crawl errors on desktop initially after the new site went live, but these quickly returned to normal. Mobile crawl errors only became apparent after this.
There are some URL's showing which have no linking page detected so we don't know where these URL's are being found. WMT states "Googlebot couldn't crawl this URL because it points to a non-existent page". Those that do have a linking page are showing an internal page which also doesn't exist so it can't possibly link to any page.
Any insight is appreciated.
Andy and Mark at Click Consult.
-
Hav you crawled your redesigned site with a tool like Xenu or ScreamingFrog? That will help ferret out any bad links / 404 pages. Also, did you submit an updated sitemap with the redesign? Use 301s? Etc.
Edit: Looks like Dirk above hit on the most likely issue regarding 301s. You should be set with that.
-
If you recently did a site redesign - you probably deleted old redirect rules as well. Google seems to keep all the url's it has indexed over time stored somewhere - and the moment the old redirects disappear - you'll see these very old url's popping up in webmastertools. I had the same experience after a recent migration, and if you search on this forum, you'll find plenty of other people who have encountered the same thing.
Nothing to worry about - if these errors in WMT are annoying you could put the old redirect rules in place again, or if they are using a seperate folder structure, you could delete these folders via WMT. These errors will disappear over time, even if you don't do anything.
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
-
NoIndex tag, canonical tag or automatically generated H1's for automatically generated enquiry pages?
What would be better for automatically generated accommodation enquiry pages for a travel company? NoIndex tag, canonical tag, automatically generated H1's or another solution? This is the homepage: https://www.discoverqueensland.com.au/ You would enquire from a page like this: https://www.discoverqueensland.com.au/accommodation/sunshine-coast/twin-waters/the-sebel-twin-waters This is the enquiry form: https://www.discoverqueensland.com.au/accommodation-enquiry.php?name=The+Sebel+Twin+Waters®ion_name=Sunshine+Coast
Technical SEO | | Kim_Lazaro0 -
What's the best way to pass link juice to a page on another domain?
I'm working with a non-profit, and their donation form software forces them to host their donation pages on a different domain. I want to attempt to get their donation page to appear in their sitelinks in Google (under the main website's entry), but it seems like the organization's donation forms are at a disadvantage because they're not actually hosted on that site. I know that no matter what I do, there's no way to "force" a sitelink to appear the way I want it, but... I was trying to think if there's a way I can work around this. Do you think 1) creating a url like orgname.org/donate and having that be a 301 redirect to the donation form, and 2) using the /donate redirect all over the site (instead of linking directly to the form) would help? Are there alternatives other folks recommend?
Technical SEO | | clefevre0 -
Test site got indexed in Google - What's the best way of getting the pages removed from the SERP's?
Hi Mozzers, I'd like your feedback on the following: the test/development domain where our sitebuilder works on got indexed, despite all warnings and advice. The content on these pages is in active use by our new site. Thus to prevent duplicate content penalties we have put a noindex in our robots.txt. However off course the pages are currently visible in the SERP's. What's the best way of dealing with this? I did not find related questions although I think this is a mistake that is often made. Perhaps the answer will also be relevant for others beside me. Thank you in advance, greetings, Folko
Technical SEO | | Yarden_Uitvaartorganisatie0 -
Are image pages considered 'thin' content pages?
I am currently doing a site audit. The total number of pages on the website are around 400... 187 of them are image pages and coming up as 'zero' word count in Screaming Frog report. I needed to know if they will be considered 'thin' content by search engines? Should I include them as an issue? An answer would be most appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz0 -
URL removals
Hello there, I found out that some pages of the site have two different URL's pointing at the same page generating duplicate content, title and description. Is there a way to block one of them? cheers
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Marketing URL
Hi, I need a bit of advice on marketing URL's. The destinations URL is http://www.website.com/by-development.php?area=Isle Of Wight&development=developmentname. If we wanted to use www.website.com/developmentname on literature to send people to the ugly URL above, what would we do? Would we need to rewrite the ugly URL to the neat and then 301 the ugly to the neat? Currently, the team are using a new domain of neatandrelevant.info and 301 redirecting it to ugly URL but there are lots of different developments they want to send people to so a new domain is bought for each development which seems a bit unnecessary. They point to different pages on the ugly URL website. Assuming canonical tag would not be needed then because the ugly URL page would be redirected. Also, as the website has ugly URL's anyway, would it not be best practice to use rewrites anyway so that the URL's read www.mywebsite.com/region/development? Would it confuse things to then have extra short marketing URL's missing out /region? Hope that makes sense....
Technical SEO | | Houses0 -
Where did the 'Contributor To' area go in Google+
I went into my Google+ profile this morning to try to add a new guest blog in the 'Contributor To' section but I can't find it. Did they move it somewhere?
Technical SEO | | JonathanGoodman0 -
Friendly URL
Can be Friendly URL installed on a custom made jobsite using mod rewrite / apache without any big interference to the system itself? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | tomaz770