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.
Difference between urls and referring urls?
-
Sorry, nit new to this side of SEO
We recently discovered we have over 200 critical crawler issues on our site (mainly 4xx)
We exported the CSV and it shows both a URL link and a referring URL. Both lead to a 'page not found' so I have two questions?
What is the difference between a URL and a referring URL?
What is the best practice/how do we fix this issue? Is it one for our web developer?
Appreciate the help.
-
No. The referring URL is a page on your site that has a broken link on it. These are damaging your rankings so so fix ASAP. Go to all the referring pages and fix or remove the links with the URL in.
-
I believe "URL" is the page on your website that is 404ing/Broken, the "Referring URL" is the website someone found your URL on and clicked through to. For example, if you had a broken link on a Facebook post you did, it would show the URL as "yourwebsite.com/examply" (broken link) and the Referring URL would be "facebook.com/yourprofile".
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
-
Why Do Different Tools Report 404s Differently?
Hi Mozers, How come Moz reports just six 404 errors, whereas Google Search Console reports 250 and Screaming Frog only reports a dozen? It seems to me that these results are all over the place. Shouldn't these reports be more consistent? I do understand that Search Console includes historical data and that URLs or issues need to be "marked as fixed" in order for them to go away, however, even if I do this, Google ends up reporting far more errors than anything else. Do 404s reported by Moz and Screaming Frog NOT include external links? It seems to me that this could be partially responsible for the issue. Also, is there a way to efficiently track the source of the 404s besides clicking on "Linked From" within Search Console 250 times? I was looking for something like this is Moz or SF but no luck. Any help is appreciated. Thanksabunch!
Moz Pro | | EricFish0 -
Url-delimiter vs. SEO
Hi all, Our customer is building a new homepage. Therefore, they use pages, which are generated out of a special module. Like a blog-page out of the blog-module (not only for blogs, also for lightboxes). For that, the programmer is using an url-delimiter for his url-parsing. The url-delimiter is for example a /b/ or /s/. The url would look like this: www.test.ch/de/blog/b/an-article www.test.ch/de/s/management-coaching Does the url-delimiter (/b/ or /s/ in the url) have a negative influence on SEO? Should we remove the /b/ or /s/ for a better seo-performance Thank you in advance for your feedback. Greetings. Samuel
Moz Pro | | brunoe10 -
Youtube traffic page url referral
Hello, How can I see which videos from Youtube that has my domain inserted in their description url drive traffic to my domain? I can see in GA how many visitors are coming from Youtube to my domain, but I can't see what Youtube video pages has driven traffic. Any help?
Moz Pro | | xeonet320 -
Block Moz (or any other robot) from crawling pages with specific URLs
Hello! Moz reports that my site has around 380 duplicate page content. Most of them come from dynamic generated URLs that have some specific parameters. I have sorted this out for Google in webmaster tools (the new Google Search Console) by blocking the pages with these parameters. However, Moz is still reporting the same amount of duplicate content pages and, to stop it, I know I must use robots.txt. The trick is that, I don't want to block every page, but just the pages with specific parameters. I want to do this because among these 380 pages there are some other pages with no parameters (or different parameters) that I need to take care of. Basically, I need to clean this list to be able to use the feature properly in the future. I have read through Moz forums and found a few topics related to this, but there is no clear answer on how to block only pages with specific URLs. Therefore, I have done my research and come up with these lines for robots.txt: User-agent: dotbot
Moz Pro | | Blacktie
Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0 User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0 My questions: 1. Are the above lines correct and would block Moz (dotbot and rogerbot) from crawling only pages that have numberOfStars=0 parameter in their URLs, leaving other pages intact? 2. Do I need to have an empty line between the two groups? (I mean between "Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0" and "User-agent: rogerbot")? (or does it even matter?) I think this would help many people as there is no clear answer on how to block crawling only pages with specific URLs. Moreover, this should be valid for any robot out there. Thank you for your help!0 -
Why is MOZ and Google search Volume so different?
A search term in MOZ shows the monthly search volume to be 49K. In Google, the same term shows the search volume at only 1300 monthly searches. Which do I trust? Thanks, Don
Moz Pro | | rcman0 -
Crawlers crawl weird long urls
I did a crawl start for the first time and i get many errors, but the weird fact is that the crawler tracks duplicate long, not existing urls. For example (to be clear): there is a page: www.website.com/dogs/dog.html but then it is continuing crawling:
Moz Pro | | r.nijkamp
www.website.com/dogs/dog.html
www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dog.html
www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dogs/dog.html
www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dogs/dogs/dog.html
www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dogs/dogs/dogs/dog.html what can I do about this? Screaming Frog gave me the same issue, so I know it's something with my website0 -
Site Explorer - No Data Available for this URL
Hi All I have just joined on the trial offer, im not sure if i can afford the monthly payments, but im hoping SEOmoz will show me that i also cannot afford to be without it! In my proses of learning this site and flicking through each section to see what things do. However when i enter my URL into Site Explorer i get the following message "No Data Available for this URL" My site should be crawl-able, so how do i get to see data for my site/s. I wont post my URL here, as the site has a slightly adult theme.
Moz Pro | | jonny512379
If anyone could confirm if i can post "slightly adult" sites. Best Regards
Jon0 -
Batch lookup domain authority on list of URL's?
I found this site the describes how to use excel to batch lookup url's using seomoz api. The only problem is the seomoz api times out and returns 1 if I try dragging the formula down the cells which leaves me copying, waiting 5 seconds and copying again. This is basically as slow as manually looking up each url. Does anyone know a workaround?
Moz Pro | | SirSud1