URL Errors in webmaster tools to pages that don't exist?
-
Hello, for sometime now we have URLs showing up in Google webmaster saying these are 404 errors but don't exist on our website.......but also never have?
Heres an example
cosmetic-dentistry/28yearold-southport-dentist-wins-best-young-dentist-award/801530293
The root being this goo.gl/vi4N4F
Really confused about this? We have recently made our website wordpress?
Thanks
Ade
-
Ok great, thanks for your advice Linda, have a nice day.!
-
Sometimes people make pages like that as landing pages for PPC or other types of campaigns and then abandon them.
I found one like that on one of my sites once by noticing that a page I did not recognize was getting a lot of search traffic--I ended up integrating it into my structure with a new URL, and 301 redirecting the old URL to that new page.
If you think those might be good pages for you, different from similar pages you might already have, you can update them and do that as well.
If they are not especially useful to you, you could just 301 them to the most similar pages. [Are they getting traffic? I think Google must see something in them, if they are still indexed.] They probably wouldn't do any harm if you just leave them, but I'd take care of them anyway.
-
Ok great, thanks Linda, its odd because Google isn't saying where its linked or they are linked from like it normally does.
Did you see this question
would this page http://goo.gl/YoPg0q and this page http://goo.gl/kRq0Pd be classed as ghosting? this wasn't the intention but Ive come across this page whilst doing some site research from along time ago and wondering if it would effect my ranking? Should i put a 301 or do you think its ok to leave?
Thanks, i appreciate your feedback.
-
Sometimes when people link to you, they make a mistake (or even make up pages from what I can tell--I have seen some weird things). In that case, Google will still try to look for it and report back to you that it saw a link to such a page somewhere. [In Webmaster Tools, you will be able to see the referring site.]
What I do in a case like that is ignore it, unless it seems to be from a good site. In that case, I contact the site with a correct link and if I get no reply, I just create a redirect of the link to a relevant page.
-
Hi, yes this is what i mean, this is why I'm so confused by it. It has never been a page on the website, we've checked an triple checked this.
-
A 404 is not a redirect, it means not found. So it is probably the case that someone linked to that page when it was up and Google is following that old link and not finding the page.
-
Sorry Linda, just re-read when you say 301, its in google webmaster tools that its saying 404 error?
Thanks
-
Brilliant, thanks Moz guys, its helpful. One other question as i have you...
would this page http://goo.gl/YoPg0q and this page http://goo.gl/kRq0Pd be classed as ghosting? this wasn't the intention but Ive come across this page whilst doing some site research from along time ago and wondering if it would effect my ranking? Should i put a 301 or do you think its ok to leave? Thanks
-
You mean a 301 redirect? If one of the duplicates is already 301 redirected to the other, like Jaime said, just mark it fixed. [Though if it comes back up, take another look at it, because it means that Google is not seeing the fix you think you made.]
As far as affecting your SEO, duplication can cause the less relevant duplicate to not show up in search but does not cause any penalty as such. [Though make sure your internal linking uses your correct and current URLs.]
-
Ok thanks, Oddly in webmaster tools it shows HTML improvements as duplicate title tags:
/clinic_locations.html
/uk-clinics-luton-wolverhampton-locations/But the .html hasn't been around for ages, maybe 2 years? It has a 404 re-direct. Im wondering 2 things. Should I ignore this and will it be effecting my seo and if so is there any more i can do about it?
Thanks
-
This is likely just a URL from your old website structure that somebody has put a link to somewhere out there on the web (Possibly incorrectly with a typo). I would 301 redirect to the most relevant page you have on the Wordpress site and mark it as Fixed on WMT.
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
-
Crawler doesn't discover the links in the main nav
Hi Moz Community, We have a headless ecom (Magento) client that I'm trying to crawl the site. During the crawl, the tool (Screaming Frog) cannot discover the sub-category URLs in the main navigation when I start crawling via homepage. Similarly, when I start crawling with one of the sub-category page, it doesn't crawl any of the product URLs on the sub-category page itself. When I inspect product and sub-cat URLs through Search Console, they seem as indexed and if I view how Googlebot rendered the sub-category page, I can see the product URLs on the sub-cat page too. If you have any idea what's the issue with Screaming Frog and would like to help me out, I'd be so grateful! Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bbop330 -
Index, follow on a paginated page with a different rel=canonical URL
Hello, I have a question about meta robots ="index, follow" and rel=canonical on category page pagination. Should the sorted page be <meta name="robots" content="index,follow"></meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> since the rel="canonical" is pointing to a separate page that is different from the URL? Any thoughts on this topic would be awesome. Thanks. Main Category Page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Choice
https://www.site.com/category/
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow"><link rel="canonical" href="https: www.site.com="" category="" "=""></link rel="canonical" href="https:></meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> Sorted Page
https://www.site.com/category/?p=2&dir=asc&order=name
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow"=""><link rel="canonical" href="https: www.site.com="" category="" ?p="2""></link rel="canonical" href="https:></meta name="robots" content="index,> As you can see, the meta robots is telling Google to index https://www.site.com/category/?p=2&dir=asc&order=name , yet saying the canonical page is https://www.site.com/category/?p=2 .0 -
Duplicate page url crawl report
Details: Hello. Looking at the duplicate page url report that comes out of Moz, is the best tactic to a) use 301 redirects, and b) should the url that's flagged for duplicate page content be pointed to the referring url? Not sure where the 301 redirect should be applied... should this url, for example: <colgroup><col width="452"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | compassseo
| http://newgreenair.com/website/blog/ | which is listed in the first column of the Duplicate Page Content crawl, be pointed to referring url in the same spreadsheet? Or, what's the best way to apply the 301 redirect? thanks!0 -
Why Google won’t display the right page title?
I'm using a WordPress site with the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast. Why Google won’t display the right page title for my CATEGORY pages? This is s example category page I'm having a problem with: http://bit.ly/1DReQPP
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | soralsokal
In the source code of this category page you can see the title is:
<title>Yoga Übungen - Mit visuellen Guides, Videos & viel Inspiration</title> Now when I check the title in the SERPS it only gives me the the category name 'Yoga Übungen'. See screenshot here: http://awesomescreenshot.com/05942buz60
This happens with ALL the category pages on my site. Google uses the category name instead of the title provided in the source code. I found an article from Yoast dealing with this issue: https://yoast.com/google-page-title/ It's correct, that Google sometimes chooses a different page title, but this article doesn't address the exclusive category problem. For 'normal' pages or posts, Google always shows the title which I've setup in Yoast (and which is in the source code). I don't understand what goes wrong for category pages? Do any of you have a similar problem or experience with that?0 -
Webmaster Tools Not Indexing New Pages
Hi there Mozzers, Running into a small issue. After a homepage redesign (from a list of blog posts to a product page), it seems that blog posts are buried on the http://OrangeOctop.us/ site. The latest write-up on "how to beat real madrid in FIFA 15", http://orangeoctop.us/against-real-madrid-fifa-15/ , has yet to be indexed. It would normally take about a day naturally for pages to be indexed or instantly with a manual submission. I have gone into webmaster tools and manually submitted the page for crawls multiple times on multiple devices. Still not showing up in the search results. Can anybody advise?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | orangeoctop.us0 -
Is it a problem that Google's index shows paginated page urls, even with canonical tags in place?
Since Google shows more pages indexed than makes sense, I used Google's API and some other means to get everything Google has in its index for a site I'm working on. The results bring up a couple of oddities. It shows a lot of urls to the same page, but with different tracking code.The url with tracking code always follows a question mark and could look like: http://www.MozExampleURL.com?tracking-example http://www.MozExampleURL.com?another-tracking-examle http://www.MozExampleURL.com?tracking-example-3 etc So, the only thing that distinguishes one url from the next is a tracking url. On these pages, canonical tags are in place as: <link rel="canonical<a class="attribute-value">l</a>" href="http://www.MozExampleURL.com" /> So, why does the index have urls that are only different in terms of tracking urls? I would think it would ignore everything, starting with the question mark. The index also shows paginated pages. I would think it should show the one canonical url and leave it at that. Is this a problem about which something should be done? Best... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Duplicate page content and Duplicate page title errors
Hi, I'm new to SeoMoz and to this forum. I've started a new campaign on my site and got back loads of error. Most of them are Duplicate page content and Duplicate page title errors. I know I have some duplicate titles but I don't have any duplicate content. I'm not a web developer and not so expert but I have the impression that the crawler is following all my internal links (Infact I have also plenty of warnings saying "Too many on-page links". Do you think this is the cause of my errors? Should I implement the nofollow on all internal links? I'm working with Joomla. Thanks a lot for your help Marco
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marcodublin0 -
HTTP Errors in Webmaster Tools
We recently added a 301 redirect from our non-www domain to the www version. As a result, we now have tons of HTTP errors (403s to be exact) in Webmaster Tools. They're all from over a month ago, but they still show up. How can we fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kylesuss0