How to explain "No Return Tags" Error from non-existing page?
-
-
In the Search Console of our Google Webmaster account we see 3 "no return tags" errors. The attached screenshot shows the detail of one of these errors.
-
I know that annotations must be confirmed from the pages they are pointing to. If page A links to page B, page B must link back to page A, otherwise the annotations may not be interpreted correctly.
-
However, the originating URL (/#!/public/tutorial/website/joomla) doesn't exist anymore. How could these errors still show up?
-
-
Great, thanks for your responses. We'll re-submit our sitemap, and I'll share our findings here.
-
Since it's one page and doesn't even exist anymore, I honestly wouldn't lose sleep over it. There's no way to add/patch that return tag, because there's no page to add it to. Your tags on the German and Dutch homepages all seem consistent. I'd consider this a warning at best and not one likely to cause you trouble.
My only caveat - if, for some reason, Google is still indexing a bunch of AJAX-style URLs that don't exist, you may have some general crawl oddity. If this really is the only error like this you're seeing, though, it's more likely something Google just hasn't let go of yet. As Britney said, try to kick Google to reindex/recache, but otherwise I think it's likely harmless.
-
Hmm great question. If that error was from May I would re-submit your sitemap and see if that doesn't cause a re-index & fix this error.
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
-
Google tries to index non existing language URLs. Why?
Hi, I am working for a SAAS client. He uses two different language versions by using two different subdomains.
Technical SEO | | TheHecksler
de.domain.com/company for german and en.domain.com for english. Many thousands URLs has been indexed correctly. But Google Search Console tries to index URLs which were never existing before and are still not existing. de.domain.com**/en/company
en.domain.com/de/**company ... and an thousand more using the /en/ or /de/ in between. We never use this variant and calling these URLs will throw up a 404 Page correctly (but with wrong respond code - we`re fixing that 😉 ). But Google tries to index these kind of URLs again and again. And, I couldnt find any source of these URLs. No Website is using this as an out going link, etc.
We do see in our logfiles, that a Screaming Frog Installation and moz.com w opensiteexplorer were trying to access this earlier. My Question: How does Google comes up with that? From where did they get these URLs, that (to our knowledge) never existed? Any ideas? Thanks 🙂0 -
Will unused/dead pages within my site that is non-linked hurt my seo?
For example my website has mysite.com/randomunusedpage.html No links go into that page from the website but it is published (came with the WP theme). Will that hurt my SEO and should I delete the page or is it harmless? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Marvellous0 -
Trying to get on Google page one for keyword "criminal defense attorney san diego". What can I do?
I'm trying to help a friend who is an attorney get on page one for the keyword "criminal defense attorney san diego." So far I've changed his title and description tags since they weren't optimized before. (SERP shows old title tag, however I submitted a XML sitemap through Webmaster tools to get the new title tags updated.) He also had a few duplicate pages, but I took care of that with some 301 redirects. I also added a h1 tag, alt image tag, and more content. I also spent a few hours building links for him. He currently has a page authority of 52 and domain authority of 44 with a decent amount of links pointing to his site. I'm wondering why he's stuck on page 4, when his competitors that have less impressive numbers seem to show up on page 1. I did look at his link profile using OSE and I'm worried that his old SEO guy got him spam links. His website is www.nasserilegal.com, however the page I was focusing on was www.nasserilegal.com/criminal.html Any advice would be great.
Technical SEO | | micasalucasa0 -
With or without "/" at the end of domain
Hello, A client domains appear sometimes like www.domain.co.uk and sometimes like www.domain.co.uk/ I would like to place redirects from URLs that contain strings such as /index.aspx?id=42 to the main page but which one should I pick? With or without the "/" ? Thank you
Technical SEO | | DavidSpivac0 -
Are lots of links from an external site to non-existant pages on my site harmful?
Google Webmaster Tools is reporting a heck of a lot of 404s which are due to an external site linking incorrectly to my site. The site itself has scraped content from elsewhere and has created 100's of malformed URLs. Since it unlikely I will have any joy having these linked removed by the creator of the site, I'd like to know how much damage this could be doing, and if so, is there is anything I can do to minimise the impact? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Nobody15569050351140 -
Discrepency between # of pages and # of pages indexed
Here is some background: The site in question has approximately 10,000 pages and Google Webmaster shows that 10,000 urls(pages were submitted) 2) Only 5,500 pages appear in the Google index 3) Webmaster shows that approximately 200 pages could not be crawled for various reasons 4) SEOMOZ shows about 1,000 pages that have long URL's or Page Titles (which we are correcting) 5) No other errors are being reported in either Webmaster or SEO MOZ 6) This is a new site launched six weeks ago. Within two weeks of launching, Google had indexed all 10,000 pages and showed 9,800 in the index but over the last few weeks, the number of pages in the index kept dropping until it reached 5,500 where it has been stable for two weeks. Any ideas of what the issue might be? Also, is there a way to download all of the pages that are being included in that index as this might help troubleshoot?
Technical SEO | | Mont0 -
"/" at the end of a URL
I just noticed that I have the exact same page showing up separately in my Google Analytics reports. One has a "/" at the end and the other does not. Otherwise, these are the exact same URL's. Is this something I need to be aware of from a duplicate content perspective? If so, how do I go about fixing this? I thought the SE's would automatically see that a URL with a "/" at the end is the same as one without, but if that is the case, why is it showing up in my reports as two separate pages?
Technical SEO | | Blockinc0 -
Link API returns Error 500
http://lsapi.seomoz.com/linkscape/links/nz.yahoo.com?SourceCols=4&Limit=100&Sort=domain_authority&Scope=domain_to_domain&Filter=external+follow&LinkCols=4 Hi folks any idea why the above returns Err 500 ? Seems to pertain to the domain - it works on other sites just not nz.yahoo.com Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jimbo_kemp0