404 errors High Priority Issues in Moz Pro: change to 301 or not ?
-
Hi there,
Moz Pro is showing us 404 errors on our site as High Priority Issues. These 404 errors regard deleted product pages, which we did not 301. Should we 301 them all backwards ?
We have an ecommerce site. After reading How Should You Handle Expired Content? on Moz and a few other Q&A discussions I now know we should 301 each expired url and now we do so. My concern is with what was done in the past, and what we should do about it:
- for the past few years we have been leaving the pages on the site, creating a big amount of outdated url's without either content nor traffic
- in march our IT decided to delete these url's, and ask for a webpage removal in Google Search Console: we 301 only a 40 url's and 404 the other 3500
- now 6 monthts after, we still have 2500 crawl errors in the Search Console, and Moz Pro finding each week new 404 errors
Our SEO consultant says we should not bother about the errors shown in the Search Console. But I am concerned about these errors not reducing, and about Moz Pro High Priority Issues: should we 301 the url's to similar categories or products?
-
Hi Joe,
When running a scan to find error pages or bad internal linked pages, what type of scan parameters do you use? This could make sense on why I'm seeing these strange 404 error strings, such as http://website.com/ http://www.website.com/cubic-zirconia-1/ Ideas, have you seen this before?
run a Screaming Frog scan
-
Hey Isabelle - which do you not know how to check, the analytics for those 3,500 pages or the links to them?
For the analytics you'll just go back in time to when those pages were receiving traffic and check. To check the individual pages for backlinks pointing directly to them, you'll want to use Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, or Majestic to get that data. Using at least 2 of those will give you the best data on which pages are getting links.
I would investigate as to which metrics Moz Pro is using to decide if those pages are high priority to fix. It could be that Moz Pro is basing the high priority signal on the backlinks, so dive deeper into that to find out what's triggering that and then fix that problem!
-
Hi Joe,
Thank you so much for your answer. As a matter of fact much of these 3,500 pages don't receive much traffic anymore, but a lot of them have natural external links since they were product pages. The problem is, I don't know how to check it.
Your informations regarding the Search Console are usefull, so I will have to live with it being full of crawl errors. But what should I do with MOZ PRO showing some of the 404 as High Priority Issues? Does it actually mean, that those url's are somehow important and should be 301 redirect? So is MOZ PRO more liable than the Search Console on this point?
-
Hey Isabelle,
From the How Should You Handle Expired Content? post, I agree that those 4 steps outlined are the best questions to ask:
- Was there significant traffic (and not just organic, but also consider direct) coming to this page?
- How can we provide the best user experience?
- Has this page received external links? How is this page currently internally linked to?
- Is there content/resources on the page that users would still find useful?
Were those 40 pages you chose to 301 the only pages that were receiving any type of traffic, or are there perhaps more out of the other 3,500?
If some of those 3,500 pages have links from external websites linking to them, make it a high priority to 301 redirect those URLs to related category or product pages.
If some of those 3,500 pages are receiving decent amounts of visits to them still (you can see this in Google Analytics) then you can consider 301 redirecting those to improve UX and recover some traffic that may be bouncing. Set a threshold depending on the size of your site, maybe only recover URLs that have more than 10 visits a month or so.
As far as seeing the errors in Search Console, it can be annoying sometimes, but Google shows a lot of stuff as informational and it doesn't necessarily need to be acted upon. Here's a related question on Moz about that. If the pages are long gone, you don't have to worry about Google showing them.
But if you're wondering how Google is discovering these, it's possible there are old sitemaps they're crawling, or even pages on your site that link to those old pages. Definitely run a Screaming Frog scan on your site to try and uncover those.
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 Pro subscription
We have Pro subscription in the name of Convonix and we are not able to perform more than 10 tests on https://analytics.moz.com/pro/link-explorer/ Also, we are not able to see all 10 rows for "Top Followed Links" Request you to help us in this case.
Moz Pro | | Convonix0 -
Moz Insights are raising alarms --Are they useful?
Hi, Moz is alerting us about URLs being too long, titles being too long, and duplicate content. These are mostly for pages with categories of content, or the author bio pages --pages that are included by default with the template we're using in HubSpot. So that there isn't a quick way to make these changes, and anyway the pages are low-value.So my question is, how much are these issues impacting our SEO and domain authority?If these are pages no one visits (like the category and author pages) is there any reason this would be harming our SEO efforts?Thanks!
Moz Pro | | ASCI-Marketing0 -
Why doesn't Moz crawl whole pages of our website to report All On-Page issues?
Hi friends & mozzers, How can't Moz crawl whole pages of our website: https://www.4atvtires.com/ to report All Serious On-Page issues. We have more than 15000 product pages. And how could it be possible that Moz isn't able to crawl whole, just got crawl report upto 258 pages of our website, and also I can experience the same in Google webmaster ?? Please help to fix this issue as early as possible. Regards,
Moz Pro | | BigSlate
Rann0 -
Weird client errors . . .
SeoMoz is reporting a number of weird client errors. The 404 links all look like the following: http://www.bluelinkerp.com/http%3A/www.bluelinkerp.com/corporate/cases/Nella.asp What might be causing these weird links to be picked up? I couldn't find any way within the SEOmoz interface to track down the source of these links . . .
Moz Pro | | BlueLinkERP0 -
54 new 404 errors on my website?
Hi There In the latest report I have 54 404-errors. All last week, previously I had 2 404s that I fixed. In report say: Title404 : ErrorMeta DescriptionTraceback (most recent call last): File "build/bdist.linux- x86_64/egg/downpour/init.py", line 391, in _error failure.raiseException() File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site- packages/twisted/python/failure.py", line 370, in raiseException raise self.type, self.value, self.tb Error: 404 Not FoundMeta RobotsNot present/emptyMeta RefreshNot present/empty Are these normal 404 errors I have to look at and fix? Or is this some script that running on my server and causing errors? In general - what should I do to fix this? Thanks Dean
Moz Pro | | Passanger880 -
SEOMoz Crawler and rel_canonical_tag Errors
This tag is showing up on category pages (that do not have a duplicate page on the site). In mid November Google cut our traffic by 30%. Could this tag be confusing the spider? According to the moz crawler - we seemed to be dinged for this on 95% of our pages. Is this hurting us? It seems to direct back to the same page.EG: From the FMI3600 Page http://www.brick-anew.com/FMI-3600-Fireplace-Doors.html: http://www.brick-anew.com/FMI-3600-Fireplace-Doors.html"> There is only one page for the FMI 3600 Fireplace Door category - however, it does have the same products on it as other FP Door Category pages,
Moz Pro | | SammyT0 -
Most of the time getting error.
Hi, i am getting this error most of the time in linkscape since last month. Sorry dude, no inlinks found matching this criteria. Pl guide is this a bug and the sites I am trying to use linkscape for were having lot of pages crawled earlier by SEOMOZ. Thanks, Preet
Moz Pro | | PreetSibia0 -
Crawl complete, but nothing changed?
Hi everyone, According to my account, the crawl diagnostics were completed yesterday. However, the duplicate page titles that it mentions aren't correct. The changes that I implemented several days ago are not being shown in the report. When I click the duplicate page title links, the latest date in the graph is 3/26. However, it says the crawl was completed on 3/30. Does it take a few days for the reports to match what the crawl actually discovered?
Moz Pro | | beeneeb0