Very Old Pages Creeping Up - Advice
-
We are currently having very old pages dating back 5+ years ago appearing on moz all of a sudden, we don't necessarily get traffic from these links anymore and i doubt they still hold any weight.
Currently they take you to a 404 page, would there be any worth in redirecting these links?
-
Thanks for the reply, this makes a lot of sense. Very much appreciated
-
Makes a lot of sense. You'd need to crawl all the backlinks using something like ScrapeBox Free Link Checker or Screaming Frog (with certain XPath extraction settings) to see which of these links are still live. For the live ones you'd want to run something like URL Profiler over them (with paid API keys for Moz, Majestic SEO and Ahrefs) over the links to see if any of them are worth anything (by bulk fetching metrics and aggregating them in your own spreadsheet, using your own weighted custom formula). Once that was done you could decide which ones to keep and redirect those. For the others you could handle them separately or just ignore them
-
This stems from Link Explorer, pretty much all of the links are from external sites out of our hands.
-
If you're talking about Moz's crawler, it might mean that you still have links to those pages on your site even though you have removed the pages. Cleaning up links to 404s can help your 404 count decrease, both in Search Console and with Moz's crawler too
If you say that the pages have no SEO weight or traffic, redirecting them may be a waste of time. Just remove the links instead
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
-
Redirect Chain Advice
Hi, i hope you can help. My site crawl is showing that I have a redirect chain on my home page. Basically it shows I am going from : http: > https: > https://www. I need everything to go from http:// and http://www directly to https://www. without the chain. Below is a copy of the htaccess, can anyone see if there is an error in there that could be causing it. RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DaleZon
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301] BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress In addition, i have seen that they have a plugin called SSL insecure content fixer installed. It is showing this under its status: Array ( [HTTPS] => on [PHPHANDLER] => /usr/local/php70/bin/php [HTTP_X_REAL_IP] => 109.158.20.158 [HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO] => https ) I think possibly this might have something to do with the issue, any thoughts are appreciated Thanks0 -
How many links to the same page can there be for each page?
I need to know if I can add more than 2 equal links on the same page, for example 1 link in the header, another in the body and one in the footer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jorgesep0 -
Ecommerce category pages
Hi there, I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I work on a lot of webshops that are made by the same company. I don't like to say this, but not all of their shops perform great SEO-wise. They use a filtering system which occasionally creates hundreds to thousands of category pages. Basically what happens is this: A client that sells fashion has a site (www.client.com). They have 'main categories' like 'Men' 'Women', 'Kids', 'Sale'. So when you click on 'men' in the main navigation, you get www.client.com/men/. Then you can filter on brand, subcategory or color. So you get: www.client.com/men/brand. Basically, the url follows the order in which you filter. So you can also get to 'brand' via 'category': www.client.com/shoes/brand Obviously, this page has the same content as www.client.com/brand/shoes or even /shoes/brand/black and /men/shoes/brand/black if all the brands' shoes happen to be black and mens' shoes. Currently this is fixed by a dynamic canonical system that canonicalizes the brand/category combinations. So there can be 8000 url's on the site, which canonicalize to about 4000 url's. I have a gut feeling that this is still not a good situation for SEO, and I also believe that it would be a lot better to have the filtering system default to a defined order, like /gender/category/brand/color so you don't even need to use these excessive amounts of canonicalization. Because, you can canonicalize the whole bunch, but you'd still offer thousands of useless pages for Google to waste its crawl budget on. Not to mention the time saved when crawling and analysing using Screaming Frog or other audit tools. Any opinions on this matter?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adriaan.Multiply0 -
Links Questions and advice?
I have a website which has a fair few link assets that are doing very well (a lot of really powerful sites have link to them with follow links) but my commercial pages are not doing as well as a lot of sites without any other investment than (mediocre) links direct to there commercial pages with at least 10% of them carrying the money anchor text. Even pages we have had a few links for with generalized real anchor text and reasonable links do not do as well as the above due to none of them carrying the money keyword? Is it me or does google still rely on links to the commercial page and keywords with anchor text to match the money term?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
301 page into a 404
Hi I have a job board site and the way the site is built means that I cant 404 job pages once they have expired. To combat this Im looking to 301 the pages into a 404 page.Do any of you have any experience with this? Are there any potential pitfalls to doing a 404 this way? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndrewAkesson0 -
Removing old versions of a page.
Recently one of my good friends updated his iweb based screen printing site to wordpress per my recommendation. This update has helped dramatically boost his rankings to #3 for most local keywords. This new site is now V5 of his site, but all older iweb versions are still on the ftp. There are a total of 209 pages on the ftp, as versions of about 30 actual pages. The pages have changed significantly with each update, leaving very little duplicate content, but the old ones are still on the google index. Would it hurt the rankings to clean up these older versions & 301 redirect to the new versions, or should we leave them? The site for reference is: http://takeholdprinting.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GoogleMcDougald0 -
Domain advice needed, please
Could i get a little domain advice please. Launching a new website project and want to put it on a domain we already own (both domains are in the same niche as the larger project). The new project will be aimed at the UK market. The choice is: .co.uk we own with a good name, however it's Domain Authority rank is 7 and it's only about 8 months old. .com domain which is 6 years old, has a Domain Authority rank of 33 but is not as good a domain name. The Competitive Link Analysis tells me that the rivals for the keywords we would be targeting are between 24 and 42. Which domain would people go with? All things equal it would be a fair guess that the older, higher Domain Authority ranked .com will require less work to rank in the engines, however it's not as good brand wise. Thanks Carl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Page titles
Hi Guys, Hope your all well and business is good. I have been going through and changing page titles for my site which is currently huge attracting massive amounts of traffic. However from my pro membership i have notice a lot of the rankings in Google search engine has decreased. I have been using a strategy that i read on SEOMoz which is; example Keyword | Page heading | company name Is this why? if so what is the best method? I have changed nothing else so far.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wazza19850