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.
Moz-Specific 404 Errors Jumped with URLs that don't exist
-
Hello,
I'm going to try and be as specific as possible concerning this weird issue, but I'd rather not say specific info about the site unless you think it's pertinent.
So to summarize, we have a website that's owned by a company that is a division of another company. For reference, we'll say that:
OURSITE.com is owned by COMPANY1 which is owned by AGENCY1
This morning, we got about 7,000 new errors in MOZ only (these errors are not in Search Console) for URLs with the company name or the agency name at the end of the url.
So, let's say one post is: OURSITE.com/the-article/
This morning we have an error in MOZ for URLs
OURSITE.com/the-article/COMPANY1
OURSITE.com/the-article/AGENCY1
x 7000+ articles we have created. Every single post ever created is now an error in MOZ because of these two URL additions that seem to come out of nowhere.
These URLs are not in our Sitemaps, they are not in Google... They simply don't exist and yet MOZ created an an error with them. Unless they exist and I don't see them.
Obviously there's a link to each company and agency site on the site in the about us section, but that's it.
-
Not a problem! It't great that Moz's crawler picked up on this issue as it could have caused some problems over time, if it were allowed to get out of control
-
Just wanted to update quickly. The mistakes in the email links as well as the links to the two company sites proved to be the problem. After recrawling the sites, the 7,000+ errors are gone.
It's interesting because I was about to get very upset with Moz, thinking their bot had caused me half a day of headaches for nothing. Turned out they picked up an error before any other system did that would likely have done a lot of damage given that they were all contact links meant to improve transparency.
Hopefully, we caught and fixed the problem in time. In any case, thanks for your help effectdigital.
-
A more common issue than you might think and strongly likely to be a culprit
-
I've just come up on something....
In an attempt three days ago to be more transparent (it's a news site), we added "send me an email" links to each author's bio as well as links to the Company and the Agency in the footer.
Except these links weren't inserted correctly in the footer, and half the authors didn't get the right links either.
So instead of it being a "mailto" link, it was just the email which when you hovered over was the url of the page with the author email at the end... the same thing that's happening in the errors.
Same for the footer links. They weren't done correctly and sending users to OURSITE.com/AGENCY1 instead of AGENCY1's website. I've made the changes and put in the correct links. I have asked for a recrawl to see if that changes anything.
-
At this point that doesn't really matter the main thing is to analyse the referrer URL to see if there genuinely are any hidden malformed links
-
It is assuredly very weird, we just have to determine if Rogerbot has gone crazy in this Summer heat or if something went wrong with your link architecture somehow
-
Yeah that will tell you to look on the referring URL, to see if you can track down a malformed link to the error URL
look in the coding -
Other update here..
I've checked about 50 of these errors and they all say the same stats about the problem URL page.
307 words, 22 Page Authority.
I don't know if it matters, just putting it out there.
-
True, but it's as if something is creating faux URLs of a current article. Adding company names and emails to the end of the URL... It's very weird.
-
The referring URL in this case is the original url without the added element in the permalink.
So
URL: OURSITE.com/the-article/COMPANY1
Referring URL: OURSITE.com/the-article/
Does that give any more info?
-
No need to freak out though as you say "author@oursite.com" implying they are business emails (not personal emails) so you shouldn't have to worry about a data breach or anything. That is annoying though
-
The ones you want are... URL and Referring URL I believe. "URL" should be the 404 pages, "Referring URL" would be the pages that could potentially be creating your problems
-
UPDATE HERE:
I've just noticed that it is also adding the email of the author to the URL and creating an error with that as well.
So, there are three types of errors per post:
OURSITE.com/the-article/COMPANY1
-
Do you mean downloading the CSV of the issue? I tried that and it gives me the following:
Issue Type,Status,Affected Pages,Issue Grouping Identifier,URL,Referring URL,Redirect Location,Status Code,Page Speed,Title,Meta Description,Page Authority,URL Length,Title Pixel Length,Title Character Count.
Which isn't really useful as it relates to the 404 page.
I'm new to Moz, is there a direct line to an in-house resource that could tell us if it's a Rogerbot issue?
-
If you can export the data from Moz and it contains both a link source (the page the link is on) as well as a link target (the created broken URLs) then you might be able to isolate more easily, if it's you or if it's Rogerbot. If Moz UI doesn't give you that data, you'll have to ask if it's at all possible to get it from a staff member, they will likely pick this up and direct you to email (perfectly normal)
-
Thanks for the feedback. You're right about the 404 part, I should have phrased it differently. As you figured out, I meant that we are getting 404s for URLs that were never intended to exist and that we don't know how/why they are there.
We are investigating part 1, but my hope is that it is part 2.
Thanks again for taking the time to respond.
-
404s are usually for pages that 'don't exist' so that's pretty usual. This is either:
-
somewhere on your site, links are being malformed leading to these duff pages (which may be happening invisibly, unless you look deep into the base / modified source code). Google simply hasn't picked up on the error yet
-
something is wrong with Rogerbot and he's compiling hyperlinks incorrectly, thus running off to thousands of URLs that don't exist
At this juncture it could be either one, I am sure someone from Moz will be able to help you further
-
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
-
Moz Domain Authority [Megathread]
Hey Moz Community, We've noticed that there are questions about Domain Authority, what it is, and how to positively impact it. We're here to answer your questions! For a full overview, please see our help hub article here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority First, it's important to keep in mind that Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs). It is not a Google ranking factor. Domain Authority scores range from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater likelihood of ranking. Since DA is based on machine learning calculations, your site's score will often fluctuate as more, fewer, or different data points become available and are incorporated into those calculations. For instance, if facebook.com were to acquire a billion new links, every other site’s DA would drop relative to Facebook’s. Because more established and authoritative domains like Facebook will have increasingly larger link profiles, they take up more of the high-DA slots, leaving less room at the higher end of the scale for other domains with less robust link profiles. Therefore, it's significantly easier to grow your score from 20 to 30 than it is to grow it from 70 to 80. For this reason, it’s important to use Domain Authority as a comparative metric rather than an absolute one. The best way to influence your DA is to improve your overall site health with a focus on the quality and quantity of external links pointing to your site. Check out this video for more details on how to impact DA Happy analyzing!
Moz Pro | | HayleyBowyer0 -
URL Length Issue
MOZ is telling me the URLs are too long. I did a little research and I found out that the length of the URLs is not really a serious problem. In fact, others recommend ignoring the situation. Even on their blog I found this explanation: "Shorter URLs are generally preferable. You do not need to take this to the extreme, and if your URL is already less than 50-60 characters, do not worry about it at all. But if you have URLs pushing 100+ characters, there's probably an opportunity to rewrite them and gain value. This is not a direct problem with Google or Bing - the search engines can process long URLs without much trouble. The issue, instead, lies with usability and user experience. Shorter URLs are easier to parse, copy and paste, share on social media, and embed, and while these may all add up to a fractional improvement in sharing or amplification, every tweet, like, share, pin, email, and link matters (either directly or, often, indirectly)." And yet, I have these questions: In this case, why do I get this error telling me that the urls are too long, and what are the best practices to get this out? Thank You
Moz Pro | | Cart_generation1 -
Should I set blog category/tag pages as "noindex"? If so, how do I prevent "meta noindex" Moz crawl errors for those pages?
From what I can tell, SEO experts recommend setting blog category and tag pages (ie. "http://site.com/blog/tag/some-product") as "noindex, follow" in order to keep the page quality of indexable pages high. However, I just received a slew of critical crawl warnings from Moz for having these pages set to "noindex." Should the pages be indexed? If not, why am I receiving critical crawl warnings from Moz and how do I prevent this?
Moz Pro | | NichGunn0 -
MOZ Versus HUBSPOT??? If We Discontinue MOZ Subscription and Get HUBSPOT, Anything Lost?
How does Hubspot compare with MOZ? Doe it provide similar features or is the functionality very different? Is Hubspot complementary to MOZ or could it be used as a substitute? If we stopped our MOZ subscription and subscribed to Hubspot would we lose anything? Thanks, Alan
Moz Pro | | Kingalan10 -
Increase of 404 error after change of encoding
Hello, We just have launch a new version of our website with a new utf-8 encoding. Thing is, we use comma as a separator and since the new website went live, I have a massive increase of 404 error of comma-encoded URL. Here is an example : http://web.bons-de-reduction.com/annuaire%2C321-sticker%2Csite%2Cpromotions%2C5941.html instead of : http://web.bons-de-reduction.com/annuaire,321-sticker,site,promotions,5941.html I check with Screaming Frog SEO and Xenu, I can't manage to find any encoded URL. Is anyone have a clue on how to fix that ? Thanks
Moz Pro | | RetailMeNotFr0 -
I am looking for SEO tips specifically for magazine site's
I have a client who has a website that is based on a magazine. They make their money through advertisement I am primarily an inbound marketer I would be very grateful if anyone out there has any tips for a site that has been around for quite a while ( over 10 years) we are transforming the site from HTML into WordPress then hosting it with a fast managed WordPress host using CDN. I feel the lack of links is an obvious place to start however if there's anything specific to magazine based websites I would be more than grateful to hear your opinions. Thank you all in advance. Sincerely, Thomas von Zickell
Moz Pro | | BlueprintMarketing0 -
My page has a 302 redirect and I don't know how to get rid of it!
I use Internet Officer tool to see the 302 redirect but I check the redirects in the CPanel and there are none. In the .htaccess there are none either. I don't know where else to look 😞 The url is http://servicioshosting.com Can you guys help me? I can't set up a campaign because Google can't crawl the website. I can't setup the Facebook OpenGraph because of the redirect. error.jpg
Moz Pro | | vanessacolina0 -
How do you guys/gals define a 'row?'
I have a question about calls to the API and how these are measured. I noticed that the URL Metrics calls allow a batch of multiple URLs. We're in a position where we need link data for multiple websites; can we request a single row of data with link information for multiple URLs, or do we need to request a unique row for each URL?
Moz Pro | | ssimburg0