Moz is flagging my callto: links as 404s. I "fixed" with tel: & nofollow and lost 2 DA. Help?

[OCPmusic]

I changed the callto: links to tel: links in the footer and nofollowed them and my domain authority dropped 2.  I'm assuming this is because we lost 2.8K "external links"  Advice on how to remove 404s for Phone#'s without affecting DA?  Will just using the tel: format stop Moz from crawling them as 404's?  It was adding links to the 404 list that look like this: www.ocp.org/missals/callto:########### I assumed it was because to the crawlers the links looked like relative links this is what our links look like now:

<a <span="" class="html-tag">href</a><a <span="" class="html-tag">="</a>tel:###########" rel="nofollow" title="Call us">###########

Old footer links:

<a <span="" class="html-tag">href</a><a <span="" class="html-tag">="</a>callto:###########" title="Call us">###########

[OCPmusic]

I think I found my own answer,

I switched the links to the tel: format and wrapped them in Schema.org markup, and that seems to be working,  When I re-crawled the 404's went down and I'm not seeing them anymore. Still waiting on October 25th data dump to see if my DA goes back up.

I'm not sure which one resolved the issue though.

[tawnycase]

It's not that the data is false, just that it's outdated. The last time our crawler crawled your site it found those callto links were returning a 404, but if they're no longer doing so, you don't need to worry about them. That's why I suggested a robots.txt disallow for those pages — if you know those pages are fine and you're not worried about them, you can just tell our tools to skip crawling those pages entirely so we don't report those issues anymore.

The rest of the data in the report should be as accurate as possible, given that the freshest data in our index is about 60 days old or more.

[OCPmusic]

So, the information I'm getting that those links are being crawled as 404s is false? Why doesn't MOZ ignore callto links so they don't populate our reports with bad data if they aren't actually being read as 404s?  What other data in my reports is false?  You can see how this solution is troubling, right?

[tawnycase]

Hey there! Tawny from Moz's Help team here.

I think the easiest way to resolve issues from those Call links would be to block our user-agent, dotbot (or Rogerbot for Moz Pro Campaigns) from accessing those URL paths. You could set up a Disallow directive for dotbot in your robots.txt file for the site. It would look something like this:

User-agent: dotbot
Disallow: /callto

That should prevent us from crawling those telephone number pages, and we'll stop surfacing those pages as 404ing pages.

I hope that helps! If you still have questions, feel free to shoot us a note over at help@moz.com and we'll do our best to sort everything out with you.