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.
Moved company 'Help Center' from Zendesk to Intercom, got lots of 404 errors. What now?
-
Howdy folks, excited to be part of the Moz community after lurking for years!
I'm a few weeks into my new job (Digital Marketing at Rewind) and about 10 days ago the product team moved our Help Center from Zendesk to Intercom. Apparently the import went smoothly, but it's caused one problem I'm not really sure how to go about solving:
- https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/*** is where all our articles used to sit
- https://help.rewind.io/*** is where all our articles now are
So, for example, the following article has now moved as such:
- https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/115001902152-Can-I-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind-
- https://help.rewind.io/general-faqs-and-billing/frequently-asked-questions/can-i-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind
This has created a bunch of broken URLs in places like our Shopify/BigCommerce app listings, in our email drips, and in external resources etc. I've played whackamole cleaning many of these up, but these old URLs are still indexed by Google – we're up to 475 Crawl Errors in Search Console over the past week, all of which are 404s.
I reached out to Intercom about this to see if they had something in place to help, but they just said my "best option is tracking down old links and setting up 301 redirects for those particular addressed". Browsing the Zendesk forms turned up some relevant-ish results, with the leading recommendation being to configure javascript redirects in the Zendesk document head (thread 1, thread 2, thread 3) of individual articles.
I'm comfortable setting up 301 redirects on our website, but I'm in a bit over my head in trying to determine how I could do this with content that's hosted externally and sitting on a subdomain. I have access to our Zendesk admin, so I can go in and edit stuff there, but don't have experience with javascript redirects and have read that they might not be great for such a large scale redirection.
Hopefully this is enough context for someone to provide guidance on how you think I should go about fixing things (or if there's even anything for me to do) but please let me know if there's more info I can provide.
Thanks!
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 need help in doing Local SEO
Hey guys I hope everyone is doing well. I am new to SEO world and I want to do local SEO for one of my clients. The issue is I do not know how to do Local SEO at all or where to even start. I would appreciate it if anyone could help me or give me an article or a course to learn how to do it. Main question The thing that I want to do is that, I want my website to show up in top 3 google map results for different locations(which there is one actual location). For example I want to show up for
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seopack.org.ofici3
online clothing store in new york
online clothing store in los angeles or... Let's assume that we can ship our product to every other cities. So I hope I could deliver what I mean. I'd appreciate it if you could answer me with practical solutions.0 -
Shopify: AggregateRating Schema Error
Hi lovely community, I know google made some schema changes in Sept 2019. I got an AggregateRating Error:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Insightful_Media
One of offers or review or aggregateRating should be provided. I am using a third-party app 'Shopify Product Review' to implement the rating. What I should do to solve this error. Thanks very much for the help! I found many people have this issue too in the community! Many thanks Pui0 -
Forwarded vanity domains, suddenly resolving to 404 with appended URL's ending in random 5 characters
We have several vanity domains that forward to various pages on our primary domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SS.Digital
e.g. www.vanity.com (301)--> www.mydomain.com/sub-page (200) These forwards have been in place for months or even years and have worked fine. As of yesterday, we have seen the following problem. We have made no changes in the forwarding settings. Now, inconsistently, they sometimes resolve and sometimes they do not. When we load the vanity URL with Chrome Dev Tools (Network Pane) open, it shows the following redirect chains, where xxxxx represents a random 5 character string of lower and upper case letters. (e.g. VGuTD) EXAMPLE:
www.vanity.com (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.mydomain.com/sub-page/xxxxx (404, Not Found) This is just one example, the amount of redirects, vary wildly. Sometimes there is only 1 redirect, sometimes there are as many as 5. Sometimes the request will ultimately resolve on the correct mydomain.com/sub-page, but usually it does not (as in the example above). We have cross-checked across every browser, device, private/non-private, cookies cleared, on and off of our network etc... This leads us to believe that it is not at the device or host level. Our Registrar is Godaddy. They have not encountered this issue before, and have no idea what this 5 character string is from. I tend to believe them because per our analytics, we have determined that this problem only started yesterday. Our primary question is, has anybody else encountered this problem either in the last couple days, or at any time in the past? We have come up with a solution that works to alleviate the problem, but to implement it across hundreds of vanity domains will take us an inordinate amount of time. Really hoping to fix the cause of the problem instead of just treating the symptom.0 -
Not found errors (404) due to being hacked
Hi Moz Guru's Our website was hacked a few months ago, since then we have taken various measures, last one being redesigning the website all together and removing it from a WordPress platform. So far all is going well, except that the 404 not found errors keeps coming up in Google Webmaster tools. The URLs are spam pages that were created by the virus. And these spam pages have been indexed by Google, and now we are struggling to get rid of them. Is there any way we can deal with these 404 spam pages links? Is marking all of them as fixed in the webmaster tools - search console- crawl errors helpful in any way? Can this have a negative impact on the SEO ? Looking forward to your answers. Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monicapopa0 -
When should you 410 pages instead of 404
Hi All, We have approx 6,000 - 404 pages. These are for categories etc we don't do anymore and there is not near replacement etc so basically no reason or benefit to have them at all. I can see in GWT , these are still being crawled/found and therefore taking up crawler bandwidth. Our SEO agency said we should 410 these pages?.. I am wondering what the difference is and how google treats them differently ?. Do anyone know When should you 410 pages instead of 404 ? thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Moving blog to a subdomain, how can I help it rank?
Hi all, We recently moved our blog to a sub-domain where it is hosted on Wordpress. It was very recent and we're actively working on the SEO, but any pointers on getting the subdomain to rank higher than the old blog posts would be terrific. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DigitalMoz0 -
How do I get rel='canonical' to eliminate the trailing slash on my home page??
I have been searching high and low. Please help if you can, and thank you if you spend the time reading this. I think this issue may be affecting most pages. SUMMARY: I want to eliminate the trailing slash that is appended to my website. SPECIFIC ISSUE: I want www.threewaystoharems.com to showing up to users and search engines without the trailing slash but try as I might it shows up like www.threewaystoharems.com/ which is the canonical link. WHY? and I'm concerned my back-links to the link without the trailing slash will not be recognized but most people are going to backlink me without a trailing slash. I don't want to loose linkjuice from the people and the search engines not being in consensus about what my page address is. THINGS I"VE TRIED: (1) I've gone in my wordpress settings under permalinks and tried to specify no trailing slash. I can do this here but not for the home page. (2) I've tried using the SEO by yoast to set the canonical page. This would work if I had a static front page, but my front page is of blog posts and so there is no advanced page settings to set the canonical tag. (3) I'd like to just find the source code of the home page, but because it is CSS, I don't know where to find the reference. I have gone into the css files of my wordpress theme looking in header and index and everywhere else looking for a specification of what the canonical page is. I am not able to find it. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file. (4) Went into cpanel file manager looking for files that contain Canonical. I only found a file called canonical.php . the only thing that seemed like it was worth changing was changing line 139 from $redirect_url = home_url('/'); to $redirect_url = home_url(''); nothing happened. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file. (5) I have gone through the .htaccess file and put thes 4 lines at the top (didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) and then at the bottom of the file (also didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) : RewriteEngine on
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dillman
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z.]+)?threewaystoharems.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://www.%1threewaystoharems.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] Please help friends.0 -
Recovering from robots.txt error
Hello, A client of mine is going through a bit of a crisis. A developer (at their end) added Disallow: / to the robots.txt file. Luckily the SEOMoz crawl ran a couple of days after this happened and alerted me to the error. The robots.txt file was quickly updated but the client has found the vast majority of their rankings have gone. It took a further 5 days for GWMT to file that the robots.txt file had been updated and since then we have "Fetched as Google" and "Submitted URL and linked pages" in GWMT. In GWMT it is still showing that that vast majority of pages are blocked in the "Blocked URLs" section, although the robots.txt file below it is now ok. I guess what I want to ask is: What else is there that we can do to recover these rankings quickly? What time scales can we expect for recovery? More importantly has anyone had any experience with this sort of situation and is full recovery normal? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RikkiD220