Crawl Diagnostics Report Lacks Information
-
When I look at the crawl diagnostics, SEOMoz tells me there are 404 errors.
This is understandable, because some pages were removed.
What this report doesn't tell me is how those pages were discovered.
This is a very important piece of information, because it would tell me there are links pointing to those pages, either internal or external. I believe the internal links have been removed.
If the report told me how if found the link, I would be able to take immediate action. Without that information, I have to go so a lot of investigation. And when you have a million pages, that isn't easy.
Some possibilities:
- The crawler remembered the page from the previous crawl.
- There was a link from an index page - i.e. it is in the database still
- There was an individual link from another story - so now there are broken links
- Ditto, but it in on a static index page
- The link was from an external source - I need to make a redirect
Am I missing something, or is this a feature the SEO Moz crawler doesn't have yet?
What can I do (other than check all my pages) to discover this?
-
OK thank you, Ralph
I can work on that.
-
I think it's the SEOMoz crawler, but what I have found is that the error reports are limited here whereas GWT is much bigger and shows the links leading to the error. My guess is that SEOMoz limit the number of crawl errors they show due to limitations set on their crawler i.e. while their crawl is comprehensive, it's not going to capture what Google does.
-
Thank you Ralph.
Yes, had it for years. So is this a GWT report? I thought it was SEOMoz !
No not IIS, Linux.
-
If you download the csv file for the crawl you can sort it by http status to get all of the 404 errors together. Then there is a specific column that contains the referrer that provides the information you are after.
-
This may be a silly question, but have you got Google Webmaster tools installed? That will show you the source of the errors.
If your site is on IIS then you should also use the awesome IIS SEO toolkit provided by Microsoft for free.
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
-
Keyword Rankings Report Accuracy
How many of you routinely have inaccurate data in your Moz Pro keyword rankings reports? I just checked 5 of our terms that came in this morning - yes, it's a not logged in, non-personalized, incognito, cleared cache search - and none of them actually ranked where Moz said they ranked. One was listed in the top 5 and wasn't even on the first page. One was listed at position 3 but was actually at position 8, a big difference when it comes to CTR. And the report will have stuff like our brand name not ranked at all one week, then jumping by 45+ positions the next week, then gone the next week. And it doesn't fluctuate like that. I get that the reports are general to what most people see, but should such big disparities be expected?
Moz Pro | | Kingof50 -
Raven Reporting Alternative
Does anyone know of a tool that has similar capacity to Raven's Reports? I'm doing some white labeling of reports for another Agency that is used to sending their clients a monthly Raven report that is basicly pulling out all the Google Analytic Data of top referrers, keywords, landing pages ect and putting them into a nice format. I've used the Moz reporting and at times just combined it with a pdf of the actual GA equivalent. That's always seemed a bit clunky but I don't want to have to take on a Raven subscription just for that. Anyone have any good alternatives or know if when the new dashboard launches if it will also up its game when it comes to the generated reports?
Moz Pro | | BCutrer0 -
Question #3) My last question has to do with Some SEOmoz crawl diagnostics -
I recently fixed (or well, I am asking to make sure that this was the right thing to do in my first question posted a few minutes ago), a problem where all of my internal main sidebar category pages were linking using https://, which to my knowledge means SECURE pages. anyways, OSE, and google seem to be not recognizing the link juice. but my rank fell for one of my main keywords by 2 positions about a week after i made the fix to have the pages be indexable. Making my pages properly linked can't be a bad thing right? That's what I said. So I looked deeper, and my crawl diagnostics reports showed a MASSIVE reduction in warnings (about 3,000 301 redirects were removed by changing the https:// to http:// because all the secure pages were re-directing to http:// regular structure) and an INCREASE, in Duplicate Page Titles, and Temporary redirects... Could that have been the reason the rank dropped? I think I am going to fix all the Duplicate Page Title problems tonight, but still, I am a little confused as to why such a major fix didn't help and appeared to hurt me. I feel like it hurt the rank, not because of what I did, but because what I did caused a few extra re-directs, and opened the doors for the search engine to discover more pages that had problems (which could have triggered an algo that says hey, these people have to much duplicate problems) Any thoughts will be GREATLY appreciated thumbed, thanked, and marked as best answers! Thanks in advance for your time, Tyler A.
Moz Pro | | TylerAbernethy0 -
How to find page with the link that returns a 404 error indicated in my crawl diagnostics?
Hi Newbie here - I am trying to understand what to do, step by step, after getting my initial reports back from seomoz. The first is regarding the 404 errors shown as high priority to fix, in crawl diagnostics. I reviewed the support info help on the crawl diagnostics page referring to 404 errors, but still did not understand exactly what I am supposed to do...same with the Q&A section when I searched how to fix 404 errors. I just could not understand exactly what anyone was talking about in relation to my 404 issues. It seems I would want to find the page that had the bad link that sent a visitor to a page not found, and then correct the problem by removing the link, or correcting and re-uploading the page being linked to. I saw some suggestions that seemed to indicate that seomoz itself will not let me find the page where the bad link is and that I would need to use some external program to do this. I would think that if seomoz found the bad page, it would also tell me what page the link(s) to the bad page exists on. A number of suggestions were to use a 301 redirect somehow as the solution, but was not clear when to do this versus, just removing the bad link, or repairing the page the link was pointing to. I think therefore my question is how do I find the links that lead to 404 page not founds, and fix the problem. Thanks Galen
Moz Pro | | Tetruss0 -
No Info on My On-page Optimization Scan Reports
I'm not getting any information on On-page Optimization reports. I.E. All the Grade A - F reports are empty. How do I get On-page Optimization reports?
Moz Pro | | lbohen0 -
How can i get seomoz to crawl a campaign on demand
hi how can i get seomoz to crawl a campaign on demand instead of on a weekly basis? For example i have corrected some error warnings and on page elements and would like it to re crawl the site sooner to see how the corrections have worked? thanks
Moz Pro | | Bristolweb0 -
SEOmoz Pro dashboard report question
Hi there, SEOMoz dashbard report shows 'URLs Receiving Entrances Via Search' - Is it counting only organic searches or all searches including PPC? Thanks, Gemma
Moz Pro | | RBA0