Identify Page Not Found Visits
-
Hello everyone! I have always known enough about Google Analytics and SEO to be dangerous, but was not a focus for me. I am working on a project were I am looking at stuff where my knowledge is limited.
The scenario is that the domain I am looking at will serve a 404 error, but keeps the url, I guess for tracking purposes.
At the same time, there is a page "Page_Not_Found" that has elevated visits.
-
I am not sure how to tell where the visits are coming from to the PNF since the Previous Page is mostly identified as "(entrance)"
-
Is the PNF correlated to the process of serving an error page but not changing the URL?
Ideally, I am looking to identify and improve the 404 visits. I hope that I provided clear enough information. Happy to provide more as needed.
-
-
@cayk I am not sure how to do that, but I might be able to research and ask around. Thank you.
-
@hankhoffmeier Additional to the other replies here, if you can add an image unique to the 404 error, you could get the information you're hunting for server-side by measuring the hits to the image in question. Many server side reporting tools will also allow showing image downloads by URL, which would workaround your core issue that with regard to the 404 URLS themselves.
-
@lynnpatchett Thank you. I tried ScreamingFrog. Where is did help with some items, it did not help me with the overall problem. I will keep researching.
-
@lynnpatchett said in Identify Page Not Found Visits:
If you think you have internal links to 404 pages try https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/ - it is a tool to crawl your site and you can filter for your 404s and then see which of your pages the links are on. It is a real timesaver! The free version has some restrictions but should be enough to get you started,
Thank you for the link. That worked for me!
-
@lynnpatchett Thank you. I will take a look at both!
-
@hankhoffmeier Hi, bit of a late reply but try the following:
-
In analytics you can go to the behavior -> site content -> landing page report and the filter for your page not found url (or page title if it is common across 404s). This will give you external sites that are linking to one of your 404 pages.
-
If you think you have internal links to 404 pages try https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/ - it is a tool to crawl your site and you can filter for your 404s and then see which of your pages the links are on. It is a real timesaver! The free version has some restrictions but should be enough to get you started,
Hope it helps!
-
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
-
Strange - Search Console page indexing "../Detected" as 404
Anyone seen this lately? All of a sudden Google Search Console is insisting in Page indexing that there is a 404 for a page that has never existed on our client's site: https://........com.au/Detected We've noticed this across a number of sites, precisely in this way with a capitalised "/Detected" To me it looks like something spammy is being submitted to the SERPs (somehow) and Google is trying to index that and then getting a 404. Naturally MOZ isn't picking it up, cause the page simply never existed - it's just happening in Search Console 2afc7e35-71e4-4e25-80a3-690bf10776a7.png It comes and it goes in the 404 alerts in Console and is really annoying. I reckon it started happening late 2022.
Reporting & Analytics | | DanielDL0 -
Unsolved How does Moz compile the "Important pages on your site are returning a 4xx error!" report?
I have over 200 links in this report (mostly from a staging site). I have deleted that staging site and I cannot find the reference to the other links. So my question is, where is Moz finding these links?
Moz Pro | | nomad_blogger0 -
I have over 3000 4xx errors on my site for pages that don't exist! Please help!
Hello! I have a new blog that is only 1 month old and I already have over 3000 4xx errors which I've never had on my previous blogs. I ran a crawl on my site and it's showing as my social media links as being indexed as pages. For example, my blog post link is:
Technical SEO | | thebloggersi
https://www.thebloggersincentive.com/blogging/get-past-a-creative-block-in-blogging/
My site is then creating a link like the below:
https://www.thebloggersincentive.com/blogging/get-past-a-creative-block-in-blogging/twitter.com/aliciajthomps0n
But these are not real pages and I have no idea how they got created. I then paid someone to index the links because I was advised by Moz, but it's still not working. All the errors are the same, it's indexing my Twitter account and my Pinterest. Can someone please help, I'm really at a loss with it.
2f86c9fe-95b4-4df5-aeb4-73570881938c-image.png0 -
URL Errors Help - 350K Page Not Founds in 22 days
Got a good one for you all this time... For our site, Google Search Console is reporting 436,758 "Page Not Found" errors within the Crawl Error report. This is an increase of 350,000 errors in just 22 days (on Sept 21 we had 87,000 errors which was essentially consistently at that number for the previous 4 months or more). Then on August 22nd the errors jumped to 140,000, then climbed steadily from the 26th until the 31st reaching 326,000 errors, and then climbed again slowly from Sept 2nd until today's 436K. Unfortunately I can only see the top 1,000 erroneous URLs in the console, of which they seem to be custom Google tracking URLs my team uses to track our pages. A few questions: 1. Is there anyway to see the full list of 400K URLs Google is reporting they cannot find?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | usnseomoz
2. Should we be concerned at all about these?
3. Any other advice? thanks in advance! C0 -
Page and Domain Authority
How much Page and Domain Authority we need to look for to secure a backlink.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ross254sidney0 -
Should I merge these pages
I have this business and am not sure if I should have a separate page for all of the different roofing subservices or if i should put them all on one page. Even though they are separate, but related services, I feel they could end up competing against one another If I merge them I will also have more related and keyword rich content on one page that I could focus my efforts on.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Drop in indexed pages!
Hi everybody! I've been working on http://thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/ for a little while now. Until recently, everything was great - good rankings for the key terms of 'bird hides' and 'pond dipping platforms'. However, rankings have tanked over the past few days. I can't point my finger at it yet, but a site:thewilddeckcompany.co.uk search shows only three pages have been indexed. There's only 10 on the site, and it was fine beforehand. Any advice would be much appreciated,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Wrong page in serps
Hi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | niclaus78
I've been working with a law firm's website for a couple of years and we've encounter a problem. The pages were divided to target employers and employees separately. For the very targeted keywords mentioning either employees or employers everything was good but for broader less targeted keywords e.g unfair dismissal keywords chooses either one or the other which is a problem. Now I created this ''bridge'' pages where all the topics are explained and then users are directed to and then they will chose where to go. the problem is a lot of off page was created during this years either targeting on or the other. What I plan to do is: -Create a new site map and changing the priority, so the new pages will have a priority 1 and the others less. - bookmarks, articles, etc will be targeting now to the new pages. I place the new pages linked from the home page so that they get the link juice of the home page and they are also now more a category page in the map, so a level up comparing to the previous ones. Questions: 1- Is it worthwhile adding a rel canonical tag to the new pages and rel alternate to previous pages, or if its not a question of duplicate content it shouldn't have an impact? What other things should I take into consideration? Thanks a lot. nico0