Is Google Webmaster tools Accurate?
-
Is Google webmaster Tools data completely inaccurate, or am I just missing something? I noticed a recent surge in 404 errors detected 3 days ago (3/6/11) from pages that have not existed since November 2011.
They are links to tag and author archives from pages initially indexed in August 2011. We switched to a new site in December 2011 and created 301 redirects from categories that no longer exist, to new categories. I am a little perplexed since the Google sitemap test shows no 404 errors, neither does SEO MOZ Crawl test, yet under GWT site diagnostics, these errors, all 125 of them, just showed up.
Any thought/insights?
We've worked hard to ensure a smooth site migration and now we are concerned.
-Jason
-
No problem, and good luck hunting it down
-
Thanks Charles. Never would have have thought of AW Stats..and the WMT article was very helpful. Yes it is mostly annoying, since it's hard to explain to a client that errors "are not really errors" sometimes. They are attorneys and want specific explanations...until now this was un-explainable.
Thanks again.
-
Do you run a log file analyzer like AW Stats? If not you should be able to set it up and have it build stats for you as long as you have your log files laying around.
The reason I ask is that AW Stats will show you what files on your site are throwing 404 errors specifically. It might be that it isn't a page, but a file that is referenced by multiple pages in your site that no longer exists. This would throw a 404 response, and depending on how your system handles 404's the google bot might be getting redirected to a 404 page when trying to access that file.
It's not highly likely, but I would check into that.
If you are concerned about the 404's causing problems for your rankings you shouldn't worry about it in most cases. Check out the article here for more details: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html
If it is just annoying you I would dig into the log files and see exactly when the 404 is being thrown, and what the file is that is doing it.
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 Pagination Changes
What with Google recently coming out and saying they're basically ignoring paginated pages, I'm considering the link structure of our new, sooner to launch ecommerce site (moving from an old site to a new one with identical URL structure less a few 404s). Currently our new site shows 20 products per page but with this change by Google it means that any products on pages 2, 3 and so on will suffer because google treats it like an entirely separate page as opposed to an extension of the first. The way I see it I have one option: Show every product in each category on page 1. I have Lazy Load installed on our new website so it will only load the screen a user can see and as they scroll down it loads more products, but how will google interpret this? Will Google simply see all 50-300 products per category and give the site a bad page load score because it doesn't know the Lazy Load is in place? Or will it know and account for it? Is there anything I'm missing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
I have never seen this in Google SERPs before?
What is this that I am seeing in the Google SERPs? It's a bank of 3 separate articles from one site, but they are grouped together like an organic listing. Checkout the link to see what I'm talking about http://imgur.com/xbUk1NG
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
Google Penalties not in Webmaster tools?
Hi everybody, I have a client that used to rank very well in 2014. They launched an updated URL structure early January 2015, and since they rank very low on most of the keywords (except the brand keywords). I started working with them early this year, tried to understand what happened, but they have no access to their old website and I cant really compare. I tried the started optimisation methods but nothing seems to work. I have a feeling they have been penalised by Google, probably a Panda penalty, but their Webmaster tools account does not show any penalties under manual actions. Do people impose penalties that are not added to Webmaster tools? If so, is there away I can find out what penalties and what is wrong exactly so we can start fixing it? The website is for a recruitment agency and they have around 400 jobs listed on it. I would love to share the link to the website but I don't believe the client will be happy with that. Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQi0 -
Reporting Webspam to Google
We are in ecommerce, and there are a few review sites that are dominating the rankings for our products. The sites are very good - very well written content (2000+ words) and visually appealing sites. The 2 main culprits are clearly black hat. One site's backlinks are pure spam, and the other is buying footer and sidebar links. Will ratting them to Google have any impact? If not, any suggestions on how to compete? Our competing pages are product descriptions, and creating a 2000 word product description seems inappropriate. Also, all of these products are brand new, and due to extensive media spends, the search volume is very high. Since they are beating us to the punch by getting good content posted first, they are proving difficult to displace.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Does having all client websites on same server/same Google Analytics red flag Google?
If you have several clients, and they are all on the same server, and also under ONE Google Analytics account, will that negatively impact with Google? They all have different content and addresses, some have the same template, but with different images.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBuck1 -
Google webmaster Smartphone errors fix
I have certain URL's that I have fixed before in google webmaster. With smartphone addition. It start appearing again. How can I fix the Google webmaster errrors for smartphones?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csfarnsworth0 -
Google and Product Description Tabs
How does Google process a product page with description tabs? For example, lets say the product page has a tab for Overview, Specifications, What's In the Box and so on. Wouldn't that content be better served in one main product description tab with the tab names used as (htags) or highlighted paragraph separators? Or, does all that content get crawled as a single page regardless of the tabs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
If it's not in Webmaster Tools, is it Duplicate Title
I am showing a lot of errors in my SEOmoz reports for duplicate content and duplicate titles, many of which appear to be related to capitalization vs non-capitalization in the URL. Case in point, if a URL contains a lower character, such as: http://www.gallerydirect.com/art/product/allyson-krowitz/distinct-microstructure-i as opposed to the same URL having an upper character in the structure: http://www.gallerydirect.com/art/product/allyson-krowitz/distinct-microstructure-I I am finding that some of the internal links on the site use the former structure and other links use the latter structure. These show as duplicate title/content in the SEOmoz reports, but they don't appear as duplicate titles in Webmaster Tools. My question is, should I try to work with our developers to create a script to change all of the content with cap letters in the destination links internally on the site, or is this a non-issue since it doesn't appear in Webmaster Tools?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbaylor0