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
-
Unsolved Ooops. Our crawlers are unable to access that URL
hello
Moz Pro | | ssblawton2533
i have enter my site faroush.com but i got an error
Ooops. Our crawlers are unable to access that URL - please check to make sure it is correct
what is problem ?0 -
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 -
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 -
Duplicate pages and Canonicals
Hi all, Our website has more than 30 pages which are duplicates. So canonicals have been deployed to show up only 10 of these pages. Do more of these pages impact rankings? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Page title inconsistency
Hi folks, Our agency rebranded from New Brand Vision to Decibel Digital a few weeks ago. Most things seem to be fine, 301 redirected the site and our site looks much better however there is one issue. When searching for our responsive site using my Iphone5, the page title appears as "New Brand Vision", even though "New Brand Vision" isn't within the source code. Our page title is <title></span><span data-mce-mark="1">Creative Digital Agency in London | Decibel Digital </span><span class="html-tag" data-mce-mark="1"></title> which is picked up on Desktop, but not through mobile search when sourcing our responsive site. Does anyone have any suggestions? Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tangent0 -
Should we show(to google) different city pages on our website which look like home page as one page or different? If yes then how?
On our website, we show events from different cities. We have made different URL's for each city like www.townscript.com/mumbai, www.townscript.com/delhi. But the page of all the cities looks similar, only the events change on those different city pages. Even our home URL www.townscript.com, shows the visitor the city which he visited last time on our website(initially we show everyone Mumbai, visitor needs to choose his city then) For every page visit, we save the last visited page of a particular IP address and next time when he visits our website www.townscript.com, we show him that city only which he visited last time. Now, we feel as the content of home page, and city pages is similar. Should we show these pages as one page i.e. Townscript.com to Google? Can we do that by rel="canonical" ? Please help me! As I think all of these pages are competing with each other.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sanchitmalik0 -
Indexing Dynamic Pages
http://www.oreillyauto.com/site/c/search/Wiper+Blade/03300/C0047.oap?make=Honda&model=Accord&year=2005&vi=1430764 How is O'Reilly getting this page indexed? It shows up in organic results for [2005 honda accord windshield wiper size].
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
Keep Pages with Old Dates?
We have a tourism related site. We list annual events. Right now the URL extension includes the year. I assume it is better to keep the same page and update the dates, thereby keeping any links, ranking trust and authority we built. Is that the best strategy by updating the event info with the new dates? I would assume with a new page for the new year we would be starting over again and would have too much similar content and link diffusion. And in the future are we better off not including the year in the URL extension?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ebtec0