Increase in Not Found Errors
-
Hello All,
Looking for input on an issue I am having.
We used to have a website www.gazaro.com. It was a price comparison engine for consumers. A shift in the focus of the business resulted in www.360pi.com - a price intelligence tool for retailers.The two websites have similar themes, so I thought it would be valuable to pass SEO juice from the old domain to the new domain.Back in August, I noticed that Gazaro was redirected to 360pi with a meta refresh. I know a 301 redirect is preferable to a meta refresh, so we switched to a 301 redirect.Since that happened, there has been a spike in 404 errors in webmaster tools. If you hover over the url, it is actuallywww.360pi.com/deal/amazon etc etc. It is looking for gazaro urls on the 360pi domain - which don't exist. I think this is hurting our homepage ranking. Our homepage no longer ranks for "price intelligence" when it used to be in pos. 4 or 5. As it turns out, we are ranking #1 for "price intelligence" but with our product page.I'm wondering why the 404 are happening. Is something setup in correctly? Or should I have them switch back to a meta refresh.Thoughts? Thanks for your help PNM1cYO
-
Hi Amanda
You could just change your single pattern matched 301 to point all links to your old site to the home page of the new site. That way at least someone who clicks on a link to your old site will find the new site. Also without a 301 for all the links on your old site those old URLs are going to sit around in the indexes of search engines for a long time.
Peter
-
Thanks Dave and Peter - your responses are helpful.
You are correct, my goal was to do a server side 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain with the hopes of passing on SEO benefit since the website theme is similar (but targeting different audience consumer vs retailer). I understand that the poor user experience of this is now likely hurting us since the same relative path does not exist.
I'm going to remove the 301 all together since it is not helping us, and very possibly is hurting us.
-
Hi Amanda
How many 301 redirects do you have on your old site? From what you have said it sounds like just one. Is that correct of have I misunderstood something?
If you have pattern-matched all the URLs from your old site to your new site and if those URLs don't exist on your new site, then a 404 is exactly what you will get.
A single pattern-matched redirect will only work if the relative path on the new site to pages is the same relative path that it was on the old site. So if you have the following:
oldsite.com/big-widgets.html
oldsite.com/little-widgets.html
etcand you just create a single 301 redirect that says all the pages on oldsite.com have now moved to newsite.com, then the URLs on the new site will be expected to be found at the same relative paths as follows:
newsite.com/big-widgets.html
newsite.com/little-widgets.html
etcIf they are not then you will get 404s.
If your new site has the same pages as on your old site but at a different relative path then the only way to 301 redirect the old URLs is to directly cross reference them. So, for example, if the big-widgets.html page on your new site was now at a URL of widgets-big.html you would need a direct 301 redirect from oldsite.com/big-widgets.html to newsite.com/widgets-big.html for the correct page to be found.
Having rambled on about this it may be that you have done nothing like I have said (sorry about that!), but it's just that when you said "so we switched to a 301 redirect", i.e. that sounds like just one 301 redirect, not many of them.
I hope my ramblings help!
Peter
-
I'd have to see more detail to know what the 404 issue is but let me jump in and say that a big problem with the way you've done it is 301ing every page on the domain to the homepage of the new site. This is saying, "Hey Google, we're not worried about sending the visitors to a page that contains information they want." I can't say for sure of course (darn Google and their tight lips) but I'd bet dollars to donuts that they're devaluing all your links assuming that nothing is relevant since they can't assume relevancy from the way the redirect site-wide are being handled.
The 301's domain also have a "less than ideal" domains to backlinks ratio so that's likely stacking on top.
Can't answer the question here but thought I'd comment on what might be causing some of your problems.
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
-
Missing xml tag error
Our xml sitemap is divided up in to many smaller xml sitemaps so we have fewer products per sitemap, in order to easily identify errors. A couple of weeks ago, we changed our xml sitemap by reordering some of the products. However, this has left some old xml sitemaps without any data, and they are no longer appearing in our xml sitemap. But, Google is still identifying these sitemaps since they once existed, and they are giving errors since they can't locate them. Should we 404 those xml sitemaps, or is there a better way to handle this?
Technical SEO | | ang0 -
Getting a ton of "not found" errors in Webmaster tools stemming from /plugins/feedback.php
So recently Webmaster tools showed a million "not found" errors with the url "plugins/feedback.php/blah blah blah." A little googling helped me find that this comes from the Facebook comment box plugin. Apparently some changes recently have made this start happening. The question is, what's the right fix? The thread I was reading suggested adding "Disallow: /plugins/feedback.php" to the robots.txt file and marking them all fixed. Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | cbrant7770 -
SEO Question - Are 503/504 errors an issue?
Lately I've noticed more and more 503/504 errors being flagged in my MOZ reports. One week I had over 1300 errors show up. I checked Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster tools and noticed they were showing up in there too, although not near as many (50 or less per day). I contacted my hosting company about it and they said these were normal and that it was due to one nameserver reaching capacity, but that there was a backup nameserver that kicks in. I've seen one or two of these errors show up before, but never more than one or two a week. Is this something I should be concerned about?
Technical SEO | | Kyle Eaves0 -
Help! How to Remove Error Code 901: DNS Errors (But to a URL that doesn't exist!)
I have 2 urgent errors saying there are 2 x error code 909's detected. These don't link to any page - but I can tell there is a mistake somewhere - I just don't know what needs changing. http://www.justkeyrings.co.ukhttp/www.justkeyrings.co.uk/printed-promotional-keyrings http://www.justkeyrings.co.ukhttp/www.justkeyrings.co.uk/blank-unassembled-keyrings Could someone help please? screen-shot-2015-08-11-at-13.18.17.png?t=1439292942
Technical SEO | | FullSteamBusiness0 -
Remove more than 1000 crawl errors from GWT in one day?
In google webmasters tools you have the feature "Crawl Errors". This one displays the top 1000 crawl errors google have on your site. I have around 16k crawl errors at the moment, which all are fixed. But i can only mark 1000 of them as fixed each day/each time google crawls the site. (This as it only displays top 1000 errors. When i have marked those as fixed it won't show other errors for a while.) Does anyone know if it's possible to mark ALL errors as fixed in one operation?
Technical SEO | | Host10 -
Error msg 'Duplicate Page Content', how to fix?
Hey guys, I'm new to SEO and have the following error msg 'Duplicate Page Content'. Of course I know what it means, but my question is how do you delete the old pages that has duplicate content? I use to run my website through Joomla! but have since moved to Shopify. I see that the duplicated site content is still from the old Joomla! site and I would like to learn how to delete this content (or best practice in this situation). Any advice would be very helpful! Cheers, Peter
Technical SEO | | pjuszczynski0 -
Seek help correcting large number of 404 errors generated, 95% traffic halt
Hi, The following GWT screen tells a bit of the story: site: http://bit.ly/mrgdD0 http://www.diigo.com/item/image/1dbpl/wrbp On about Feb 8 I decided to fix a large number of 'duplicate title' warnings being reported in GWT "HTML Suggestions" -- these were for URLs which differed only in parameter case, and which had Canonical tags, but were still reported as dups in GWT. My traffic had been steady at about 1000 clicks/day. At midnight on 2/10, google traffic completely halted, down to 11 clicks/day. I submitted a recon request and was told 'no manual penalty' Also, the 'sitemap' indexes in GWT showed 'pending' for 24x7 starting then. By about the 18th, the 'duplicate titles' count dropped to about 600 or so... the next day traffic hopped right back to about 800 clicks/day - for a week - then stopped again, down to 10/day, a week later, on the 26th. I then noticed that GWT was reporting 20K page-not found errors - this has now grown to 35K such errors! I realized that bogus internal links were being generated as I failed to disable the PHP warning messages.... so I disabled PHP warnings and fixed what I thought was the source of the errors. However, the not-found count continues to climb -- and I don't know where these bad internal links are coming from, because the GWT report lists these link sources as 'unavailable'. I'v been through a similar problem last year and it took months (4) for google to digest all the bogus pages ad recover. If I have to wait that long again I will lose much $$. Assuming that the large number of 404 internal errors is the reason for the sudden shutoff... How can I a) verify the source of these internal links, given that google says the source pages are 'unavailable'.. Most critically, how can I do a 'RESET" and have google re-spider my site -- or block the signature of these URLs in order to get rid of these errors ASAP?? thanks
Technical SEO | | mantucket0 -
404 errors and what to do
Hi, I am fairly new to the whole seo thing and am still getting confused a bit as to what to do to sort things out. I've checked the help pages but I cannot seem to find the issue. I've just signed up so my site is crawled for the first time and coming up with more then a 1000 404 errors. I checked a couple of the links via the report I downloaded and it does indeed show a 404 error but when I check the pages all seems to work fine. I did find one issue where an image if clicked on twice was pointing to an url with 'title= at the end. Now I have tried to get of that but couldn't find anything wrong. I'm a bit lost as to where to start!
Technical SEO | | junglefrog0