Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Hundreds of 404 errors are showing up for pages that never existed
-
For our site, Google is suddenly reporting hundreds of 404 errors, but the pages they are reporting never existed. The links Google shows are clearly spam style, but the website hasn't been hacked. This happened a few weeks ago, and after a couple days they disappeared from WMT. What's the deal?
-
There have been a few people at Moz with similar problems with GSC. People always throw a few ideas around: maybe Google is creating URLs to try to find pages that it can't find through crawling links alone? Maybe another site was trying to hack your site by creating URLs they were hoping would trigger certain content on your site (a laughable idea now, but I remember my college professor showing us a site that put cost parameters in the URL during check out)?
However they got there, though, Eric and Chris gave you some good ways to make sure that you're not still in trouble (if you ever were).
Hope this helps!
-
I agree with Eric here so I won't repeat what he has said, simply offer additional suggestions.
Firstly, you can click on each entry from that Crawl Errors window in your screenshot and from the window that pops up, check out the "Linked From" tab. It will show you all the pages this broken one has links from.
If you're having no joy finding them on the pages manually, you can try the Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Crawl the site and if the 404s show up here (if they don't they probably don't exist anymore and you can mark them as "fixed" in Search Console) then click them and check out the "Linked From" tab at the bottom. This tool shows you not only the pages it's linked from but also the anchor text so you can go to the linking pages and use ctrl+f to find the offening link(s).
Hope that helps!
-
The 404 errors and other crawl data is provided by a separate database in Google, so the timing of the links and the data you're seeing isn't exactly "in sync" so to speak. I would do a few things--look at the pages to see if there's something on your site that might be causing the errors.
Another option is to look at the link data to see if there are any links pointing to those pages. I would use another source, such as OSE or Majestic.com to see if there are links pointing to those pages that Google isn't reporting (which is often the case).
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
-
I want to move some pages of my website to a folder and nav menu in those pages should only show inner page links, will it hurt SEO?
Hi, My website has a few SaaS products, to make my website simple i want to move my website some pages to its specific folder structure , so eg website.com/product1/features
Technical SEO | | webbeemoz
website.com/product1/pricing
website.com/product1/information and same for product2 and so on, the website.com/product1/.. menu will only show the links of product1 and only one link to homepage (possibly in footer). Please share your opinion will it be a good idea, from UI perspective it will be simple , but i am not sure about SEO perspective, please help thanks1 -
404 Error Pages being picked up as duplicate content
Hi, I recently noticed an increase in duplicate content, but all of the pages are 404 error pages. For instance, Moz site crawl says this page: https://www.allconnect.com/sc-internet/internet.html has 43 duplicates and all the duplicates are also 404 pages (https://www.allconnect.com/Coxstatic.html for instance is a duplicate of this page). Looking for insight on how to fix this issue, do I add an rel=canonical tag to these 60 error pages that points to the original error page? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | kfallconnect0 -
Blog Page Titles - Page 1, Page 2 etc.
Hi All, I have a couple of crawl errors coming up in MOZ that I am trying to fix. They are duplicate page title issues with my blog area. For example we have a URL of www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/1 and as we have quite a few blog posts they get put onto another page, example www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/2 both of these urls have the same heading, title, meta description etc. I was just wondering if this was an actual SEO problem or not and if there is a way to fix it. I am using Wordpress for reference but I can't see anywhere to access the settings of these pages. Thanks
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
Miss meta description on 404 page
Hi, My 404 page did not have meta description. Is it an error? Because I run report and seomoz said that a problem. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | JohnHuynh0 -
Splitting Page Authority with two URLs for the same page.
Hello guys, My website is currently holding two different URLs for the same page and I am under the impression such set up is dividing my Page Authority and Link Juice. We currently have the following page with both URLs below: www.wbresearch.com/soldiertechnologyusa/home.aspx
Technical SEO | | JoaoPdaCosta-WBR
www.wbresearch.com/soldiertechnologyusa/ Analysing the page authority and backlinks I identified that we are splitting the amount of backlinks (links from sites, social media and therefore authority). "/home.aspx"
PA: 67
Linking Root Domains: 52
Total Links: 272 "/"
PA: 64
Linking Root Domains: 29
Total Links: 128 I am under the impression that if the URLs were the same we would maximise our backlinks and therefore page authority. My Question: How can I fix this? Should I have a 301 redirect from the page "/" to the "/home.aspx" therefore passing the authority and link juice of “/” directly to “/homes.aspx”? Trying to gather thoughts and ideas on this, suggestions are much appreciated? Thanks!0 -
What should be use 301 or 302 redirection for 404 pages
Please suggest which redirection we should use for 404 pages- 301 or 302. If you can elaborate it with reason then it will be highly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | koamit0 -
How to remove the 4XX Client error,Too many links in a single page Warning and Cannonical Notices.
Firstly,I am getting around 12 Errors in the category 4xx Client error. The description says that this is either bad or a broken link.How can I repair this ? Secondly, I am getting lots of warnings related to too many page links of a single page.I want to know how to tackle this ? Finally, I don't understand the basics of Cannonical notices.I have around 12 notices of this kind which I want to remove too. Please help me out in this regard. Thank you beforehand. Amit Ganguly http://aamthoughts.blogspot.com - Sustainable Sphere
Technical SEO | | amit.ganguly0 -
Should there be a canonical tag on my 404 error page?
In my crawl diagnostics, I notice some 4xx client errors. They are appearing for pages that no longer exist, so I'm not sure what the problem is. Shouldn't they just be dealt as 404's? Anyway, on closer inspection I noticed that my 404 error page contains a canonical tag which points to the missing page. Could this be the issue? Is it a good idea to remove the canonical tag from this error page? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Leighm0
