Moz is returning some of my pages as 404 but why when they are live?
-
hi guys,
i would appreciate some advice on this.
here are some example pages where i am getting a 404 status;
http://www.colourbanners.co.uk/printed-boards/correx-boards.html
http://www.colourbanners.co.uk/printed-boards/foamex-boards.htmlThere are quite a few, but thes a live pages so why is this happening? Also our site has dropped in the SERPS, i was wondering if this has something to do with it?
many thanks
Gerry
-
Hey Gerry,
Sorry for the delayed reply. The Q&A questions only get directly assigned to the Help Team if they are marked as a product support question.
I just looked into the campaign associated with this account and I don't see that we have been reporting any 404 errors on this site, but I do see that the campaign was just created on Nov 26th, so it seems that you may have deleted and recreated the campaign. Since we are no longer reporting any 404s, I can't look into the issue directly now, but if you run into this issue again, I would recommend sending an email directly to help@moz.com so we can investigate what may be causing the issue.
Let me know if you have any other questions in the meantime.
Chiaryn
Moz Help Team -
Most likely is a Moz error. As far as I know, Roger (Moz crawler) automatically adjusts the speed depending on the site performance, I guess watching for the response times, as they crawled sites too fast, they could be either bring down your server or have their IPs blocked as a security measure. It does that automatically. However, sometimes our Websites can become slow and therefore instead of a 200 status code (success load) it gets a 404 as the server isn't responding.
Are you behind a shared server? Were you able to see Roger crawling your site? There are some free services that allows you to make some stress tests to see if your server is responding well, even under pressure.
This shouldn't have anything to do with the fact that the pages are not showing in Google, but, if you are having server issues with regular downtimes, Google may remove pages that they consider gone from your site. Google already said that a couple of 404 errors isn't enough to remove a page from their index, however, a 404 over 3 - 5 days might.
Have you verified your site on GWT? They do show crawling errors, and if they are also getting 404s they should appear there.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Canonical Page Question
Hi, I have a question relation to Canonical pages That i need clearing up. I am not sure that my bigcommere website is correctly configured and just wanted clarification from someone in the know. Take this page for example https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/ Canonical link is https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/ The Rel="next" link is https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/?sort=bestselling&page=2 and this page has a canonical tag as rel='canonical' href='https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/?page=2' /> Is this correct as above and working as it should or should the canonical tag for the second (pagination page) https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/?page=2 in our source code be saying rel='canonical' href='https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/' />
Technical SEO | | oceanstorm0 -
How to find orphan pages
Hi all, I've been checking these forums for an answer on how to find orphaned pages on my site and I can see a lot of people are saying that I should cross check the my XML sitemap against a Screaming Frog crawl of my site. However, the sitemap is created using Screaming Frog in the first place... (I'm sure this is the case for a lot of people too). Are there any other ways to get a full list of orphaned pages? I assume it would be a developer request but where can I ask them to look / extract? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | KJH-HAC1 -
404 Hurricane Update Page After?
Hi All, I am wondering if anyone could help me decide how I should go about handling a page i plan on removing and could possibly use later on. So, a perfect example is: Let's say a company in Florida posted a page about the stores hours and possibly closing due to the incoming hurricane. Once the hurricane passes and the store is reopened, should I 404 that page since another hurricane could come after? The url for the company is www.company.com/hurricane so this is a url that we would want to use again. I guess we could just 410 and name each url www.company.com/hurricane-irma & www.company.com/hurricane-jose for each new hurricane. I am just wonder what is the best practice for a situation like this. Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | aua0 -
Pages Not Getting Indexed
Hey there I have a website with pretty much 3-4 pages. All of them had a canonical pointing to one page and the same content ( which happened by mistake ) I removed the canonical URL and added one pointing to its page. Also, I added the original content that was supposed to be there to begin with. It's been weeks but those pages are not getting indexed on the SERPS while the one that they use to point with the canonical does.
Technical SEO | | AngelosS0 -
Spam pages / content created due to hack. 404 cleanup.
A hosting company's server was hacked and one of our customer's sites was injected with 7,000+ pages of fake, bogus, promotional content. Server was patched and spammy content removed from the server. Reviewing Google Webmaster's Tools we have all the hacked pages showing up as 404's and have a severe drop in impressions, rank and traffic. GWT also has 'Some manual actions apply to specific pages, sections, or links'... What do you recommend for: Cleaning up 404's to spammy pages? (I am not sure redirect to home page is a right thing to do - is it?) Cleaning up links that were created off site to the spam pages Getting rank bank // what would you do in addition to the above?
Technical SEO | | GreenStone0 -
404 not found page appears as 200 success in Google Fetch. What to do to correct?
We have received messages in Google webmaster tools that there is an increase in soft 404 errors. When we check the URLs they send to the 404 not found page:
Technical SEO | | Madlena
For example, http://www.geographics.com/images/01904_S.jpg
redirects to http://www.geographics.com/404.shtml.
When we used fetch as Google, here is what we got: .
#1 Server Response: http://www.geographics.com/404.shtml
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 14:26:59 GMT
What is wrong and what shall we do? The soft 404 errors are mainly for images that no longer exist in the server. Thanks!0 -
Numerous 404 errors on crawl diagnostics (non existent pages)..
As new as them come to SEO so please be gentle.... I have a wordpress site setup for my photography business. Looking at my crawl diagnostics I see several 4xx (client error) alerts. These all show up to non existent pages on my site IE: | http://www.robertswanigan.com/happy-birthday-sara/109,97,105,108,116,111,58,104,116,116,112,58,47,47,109,97,105,108,116,111,58,105,110,102,111,64,114,111,98,101,114,116,115,119,97,110,105,103,97,110,46,99,111,109 | Totally lost on what could be causing this. Thanks in advance for any help!
Technical SEO | | Swanny8110 -
Translating Page Titles & Page Descriptions
I am working on a site that will be published in the original English, with localized versions in French, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. All the versions will use the English information architecture. As part of the process, we will be translating the page the titles and page descriptions. Translation quality will be outstanding. The client is a translation company. Each version will get at least four pairs of eyes including expert translators, editors, QA experts and proofreaders. My question is what special SEO instructions should be issued to translators re: the page titles and page descriptions. (We have to presume the translators know nothing about SEO.) I was thinking of: stick to the character counts for titles and descriptions make sure the title and description work together avoid over repetition of keywords page titles (over-optimization peril) think of the descriptions as marketing copy try to repeat some title phrases in the description (to get the bolding and promote click though) That's the micro stuff. The macro stuff: We haven't done extensive keyword research for the other languages. Most of the clients are in the US. The other language versions are more a demo of translation ability than looking for clients elsewhere. Are we missing something big here?
Technical SEO | | DanielFreedman0