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.
Difference between urls and referring urls?
-
Sorry, nit new to this side of SEO
We recently discovered we have over 200 critical crawler issues on our site (mainly 4xx)
We exported the CSV and it shows both a URL link and a referring URL. Both lead to a 'page not found' so I have two questions?
What is the difference between a URL and a referring URL?
What is the best practice/how do we fix this issue? Is it one for our web developer?
Appreciate the help.
-
No. The referring URL is a page on your site that has a broken link on it. These are damaging your rankings so so fix ASAP. Go to all the referring pages and fix or remove the links with the URL in.
-
I believe "URL" is the page on your website that is 404ing/Broken, the "Referring URL" is the website someone found your URL on and clicked through to. For example, if you had a broken link on a Facebook post you did, it would show the URL as "yourwebsite.com/examply" (broken link) and the Referring URL would be "facebook.com/yourprofile".
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-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.
Moz Pro | | CJolicoeur0 -
Block Moz (or any other robot) from crawling pages with specific URLs
Hello! Moz reports that my site has around 380 duplicate page content. Most of them come from dynamic generated URLs that have some specific parameters. I have sorted this out for Google in webmaster tools (the new Google Search Console) by blocking the pages with these parameters. However, Moz is still reporting the same amount of duplicate content pages and, to stop it, I know I must use robots.txt. The trick is that, I don't want to block every page, but just the pages with specific parameters. I want to do this because among these 380 pages there are some other pages with no parameters (or different parameters) that I need to take care of. Basically, I need to clean this list to be able to use the feature properly in the future. I have read through Moz forums and found a few topics related to this, but there is no clear answer on how to block only pages with specific URLs. Therefore, I have done my research and come up with these lines for robots.txt: User-agent: dotbot
Moz Pro | | Blacktie
Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0 User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0 My questions: 1. Are the above lines correct and would block Moz (dotbot and rogerbot) from crawling only pages that have numberOfStars=0 parameter in their URLs, leaving other pages intact? 2. Do I need to have an empty line between the two groups? (I mean between "Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0" and "User-agent: rogerbot")? (or does it even matter?) I think this would help many people as there is no clear answer on how to block crawling only pages with specific URLs. Moreover, this should be valid for any robot out there. Thank you for your help!0 -
Why is MOZ and Google search Volume so different?
A search term in MOZ shows the monthly search volume to be 49K. In Google, the same term shows the search volume at only 1300 monthly searches. Which do I trust? Thanks, Don
Moz Pro | | rcman0 -
Special Characters in URL & Google Search Engine (Index & Crawl)
G'd everyone, I need help with understanding how special characters impact SEO. Eg. é , ë ô in words Does anyone have good insights or reference material regarding the treatment of Special Characters by Google Search Engine? how Page Title / Meta Desc with Special Chars are being index & Crawl Best Practices when it comes to URLs - uses of Unicode, HTML entity references - when are where? any disadvantage using special characters Does special characters in URL have any impact on SEO performance & User search, experience. Thanks heaps, Amy
Moz Pro | | LabeliumUSA0 -
Site Explorer - No Data Available for this URL
Hi All I have just joined on the trial offer, im not sure if i can afford the monthly payments, but im hoping SEOmoz will show me that i also cannot afford to be without it! In my proses of learning this site and flicking through each section to see what things do. However when i enter my URL into Site Explorer i get the following message "No Data Available for this URL" My site should be crawl-able, so how do i get to see data for my site/s. I wont post my URL here, as the site has a slightly adult theme.
Moz Pro | | jonny512379
If anyone could confirm if i can post "slightly adult" sites. Best Regards
Jon0 -
What Is he Difference Between Google UK and Google Great Britain
When setting up a campaign for keywords and selected search engines. I am targeting a UK market so obviously Google.co.uk is my main target. However when I set up the campaign i select Google as the SE but it asks me if I want United Kingdom or Great Britain. I selected United Kingdom and it has been returning 0 results for rankings even though I can physically see them in the SERPS. Does anyone know exactly what is the difference between the UK and GB options. I assume I should of specified GB but not sure. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks
Moz Pro | | hanv0 -
Use of the tilde in URLs
I just signed up for SEOMoz and sent my site through the first crawl. I use the tilde in my rewritten URLs. This threw my entire site into the Notice section 301 (permanent redirect) since each page redirects to the exact URL with the ~, not the %7e. I find conflicting information on the web - you can use the tilde in more recent coding guidelines where you couldn't in the old. It would be a huge thing to change every page in my site to use an underscore instead of a tilde int he URL. If Google is like SEOMoz and is 301 redirecting every page on the site, then I'll do it, but is it just an SEOMoz thing? I ran my site through Firebug and and all my pages show the 200 response header, not the 301 redirect. Thanks for any help you can provide.
Moz Pro | | fdb0 -
Discrepancies in PA and LRDs reported in different SEOmoz tools
I've noticed a difference in the reported PA and LRD numbers for URLs depending on whether you use Open Site Explorer, or look at the same metrics from within the rankings history (in your campaign set up). I've checked this for a few URLs and what I'm seeing is the reported scores for PA and LRDs is different 9 times out of ten. The PA is sometiomes higher on one report, lower on another, or vice versa. Same for LRDs. I thought it might be because one report was lagging behind and using old data, but that would only make sense if I was seeing an increase in reported LRDs, but it just as often shows a decrease ! Is this just a bug in the campaign>rankings history report or is there a reason for the discrepancies?
Moz Pro | | Websensejim0