[Very Urgent] More 100 "/search/adult-site-keywords" Crawl errors under Search Console
-
I just opened my G Search Console and was shocked to see more than 150 Not Found errors under Crawl errors. Mine is a Wordpress site (it's consistently updated too):
Here's how they show up:
Example 1:
- URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword/page2.html/feed/rss2
- Linked From: http://an-adult-image-hosting.com/search/adult-site-keyword/page2.html
Example 2 (this surprised me the most when I looked at the linked from data):
-
URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html/page/3/
-
Linked From:
-
www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html/page/2/ (this is showing as if it's from our own site)
-
http://a-spammy-adult-site.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html
Example 3:
- URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-3.html
- Linked From: http://an-adult-image-hosting.com/search/adult-site-keyword-3.html
How do I address this issue?
-
Here is what I would do
-
Disavow the domain that is linking to you from the adult site(s).
-
The fact that Google search console is showing that you have an internal page linking as well makes me want to know a) have you always owned this domain and maybe someone previously did link internally like this or b) you may have been or are hacked
In the case of b) this can be really tricky. I once had a site that in a crawl it was showing sitewide links to various external sites that we should not be linking to. When I looked at the internal pages via my browser, there was no link as far as I could see even though it showed up on the crawler report.
Here was the trick. The hacker had setup a script to only show the link when a bot was viewing the page. Plus, we were running mirrored servers and they had only hacked one server. So, the links only showed up when you were spidering a specific mirrored instance as a bot.
So thanks to the hacking, not only were we showing bad links to bad sites, we were doing this through cloaking methodology. Two strikes against us. Luckily we picked this up pretty quick and fixed immediately.
Use a spidering program or browser program to show a user agent of Googlebot and go visit your pages that are linking internally. You might be surprised.
Summary
Googlebot has a very long memory. It may be that this was an old issue that was fixed long ago. If that was the case, just show the 404s for the pages that do not exist, and disavow the bad domain and move on. Make sure that you have not been hacked as this would also be why this is showing.
Regardless, the fact that Google did find it at one point, you need to make sure you resolve. Pull all the URLs into a spreadsheet and run Screaming Frog in list mode to check them all to make sure you fix all of it.
-
-
Yep.. Looking if anyone can help with this..
-
Oh yea, I missed that. That's very strange, not sure how to explain that one!
-
Thanks for the response Logan. What you are saying definitely makes sense.. But it makes think why do I see something like Example 2 under Crawl errors. Why Google Search Console shows linked from as 2 URL - one the spammy site's and other is from my own website. How is that even possible?
-
I've seen similar situations, but never in bulk and not with adult sites. Basically what's happening is somehow a domain (or multiple) are linking to your site with inaccurate URLs. When bots crawling those sites find the links pointing to yours, they obviously hit a 404 page which triggers the error in Search Console.
Unfortunately, there's not too much you can do about this, as people (or automated spam programs) can create a link to any site and any time. You could disavow links from those sites, which might help from an SEO perspective, but it won't prevent the errors from showing up in your Crawl Error report.
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
-
Can you disallow links via Search Console?
Hey guys, Is it possible in anyway to nofollow links via search console (not disavow) but just nofollow external links pointing to your site? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lohardiu90 -
Google Webmaster tools -Fixing over 20,000+ crawl errors
Hi, I'm trying to gather all the 404 crawl errors on my website after a recent hacking that I've been trying to rectify and clean up. Webmaster tools states that I have over 20 000+ crawl errors. I can only download a sample of 1000 errors. Is there any way to get the full list instead of correcting 1000 errors, marking them as fixed and waiting for the next batch of 1000 errors to be listed in Webmaster tools? The current method is quite timely and I want to take care of all errors in one shot instead of over a course of a month.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPK0 -
Change of Address in Google Search Console
I have merged domains before and it went rather smoothly following the Moz Guide - https://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects . I've got a new challenge ahead of me though in that a client is buying the blog subdirectory associated with another domain. So it's the blog only, not the complete domain therefore a change of address for a site section doesn't exist. I believe the course of action will be the same except we'll just skip the change of address step since the original owner wants to maintain the TLD. Part of the contract is that we'll get the content which will be ported over to our domain and he'll maintain the 301's as requested and into perpetuity. Our domain is not brand new and has some credible links. Anyone encounter a transition of a partial domain before? Thanks for your help/suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoaustin0 -
Google's form for "Small sites that should rank better" | Any experiences or results?
Back in August of 2013 Google created a form that allowed people to submit small websites that "should be ranking better in Google". There is more info about it in this article http://www.seroundtable.com/google-small-site-survey-17295.html Has anybody used it? Any experiences or results you can share? *private message if you do not want to share publicly...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregB1230 -
How important is the HTML structure for on-page/on-site SEO?
To be more specific, say a page layout has Header, Body, Left Sidebar, Footer sections. Which layout from the following options is more SEO-friendly? Header > Body > Right Sidebar > Footer Body > Header > Right Sidebar > Footer Does it make a big difference to code HTML so that the the copy of the body appears in front of all other sections when spiders crawl a website? Is it worth taking extra steps to make this happen? I am asking this question because our site has a header navigation with a lot of dropdown menus. So I assume that this is "noise" for spiders as it pushes the main content of the page down. Please bear in mind that the question is more geared towards how search engine see the page rather than how it appears to the end user as layout can be controlled by CSS.This question also assumes that all other on-site SEO best practices are followed for both options.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Saugar0 -
Site less than 20 pages shows 1,400+ pages when crawled
Hello! I’m new to SEO, and have been soaking up as much as I can. I really love it, and feel like it could be a great fit for me – I love the challenge of figuring out the SEO puzzle, plus I have a copywriting/PR background, so I feel like that would be perfect for helping businesses get a great jump on their online competition. In fact, I was so excited about my newfound love of SEO that I offered to help a friend who owns a small business on his site. Once I started, though, I found myself hopelessly confused. The problem comes when I crawl the site. It was designed in Wordpress, and is really not very big (part of my goal in working with him was to help him get some great content added!) Even though there are only 11 pages – and 6 posts – for the entire site, when I use Screaming Frog to crawl it, it sees HUNDREDS of pages. It stops at 500, because that is the limit for their free version. In the campaign I started here at SEOmoz, and it says over 1,400 pages have been crawled…with something like 900 errors. Not good, right? So I've been trying to figure out the problem...when I look closer in Screaming Frog, I can see that some things are being repeated over and over. If I sort by the Title, the URLs look like they’re stuck in a loop somehow - one line will have /blog/category/postname…the next line will have /blog/category/category/postname…and the next line will have /blog/category/category/category/postname…and so on, with another /category/ added each time. So, with that, I have two questions Does anyone know what the problem is, and how to fix it? Do professional SEO people troubleshoot this kind of stuff all of the time? Is this the best place to get answers to questions like that? And if not, where is? Thanks so much in advance for your help! I’ve enjoyed reading all of the posts that are available here so far, it seems like a really excellent and helpful community...I'm looking forward to the day when I can actually answer the questions!! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | K.Walters0 -
Why google does not show my site on my branding keyword?
Hi, I am the site owner of http://www.lankahq.net. It is a youtube video hosted website. 95% of the video contents are daily telecasting TV shows and categorized to make easy to find the specific video of the day of preferred program of the viewer. About 1 year ago suddenly disappeared my site from the google. Before happened that it was performing very well in search. Google showed my site contents within few minutes after I update in their search results when someone search for that. At the moment it does not show even some one search for "lankahq". It showing only if search for "lankahq.net", "lankahq.com" or "www.lankahq.net" something like a search keyword related to my domain name. Some other websites have added my branding keyword LankaHQ as a user of their site and they showing on top of Google. But not mine. It is much appreciated if someone can have a look on this matter. I can not find where is the problem.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cprasad0 -
The Site: search and Flow of PageRank
It is my understanding that if I do a search for site:mydomain.com the results are like every other SERP in that the most authoritative pages are ranked higher. So obviously I would expect my homepage to be first (in most cases), then followed by main category pages, etc. My question is has anybody ever seen disturbing results when doing this (i.e. pages that should have no authority outranking main category pages)? Is this always an issue with site structure or can you think of other factors that may cause this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | purch0