Webmaster Tools finding phantom 404s?
-
We recently (three months now!) switched over a site from .co.uk to .com and all old urls are re-directing to the new site.
However, Google Webmaster tools is flagging up hundreds of 404s from the old site and yet doesn't report where the links were found, i.e. in the 'Linked From' tab there is no data and the old links are not in the sitemap.
SEOmoz crawls do not report any 404s.
Any ideas?
-
Okay, thanks, and you are quite right, a whole morning is more than enough energy... gotta love SEO work!!!!
-
OK, well if it truly doesn't make sense (does sound odd, and it does seem like you've done the redirects fine) and three months is more than long enough for GWT to have caught up I'd take the above approach and periodically download the 404 list and seeing if there are any additions, as well as seeing if maybe Bing Webmaster Tools agrees with GWT.
If everything is redirecting fine, then I'd be inclined to just disregard it for the time being and focus my energies elsewhere. Good luck with it!
-
Maybe temporarily stop the 301 on the old site. Re-run your crawl reports and see if there were any 404s in existence on the old site that you hadn't previously thought. Plug the links and then reinstate the 301?
Either that or, if you're sure there's no problem, download the phantom 404s to CSV and then only take note of additions to that list in future?
-
That's the strange thing, all urls on the .co.uk are 301'ing to the new site.
-
If you can't tell where the links are coming from then the next bet is as Ben said is to identify the URLs which are being linked to and 301 them to a page which is closely related (or the home page otherwise), that way you don't lose any potential visitors to your site via those links.
-
Webmaster is picking up 494 pages returning a 404 and yet Roger Bot is finding none, so I can't even identify where the links are coming from. This is the part that is confusing me.
If I try and access any of the pages reported in the list, I am simply re-directed to the new site, as we are re-directing all .co.uk pages to the .com
-
I've had similar experiences after migrating sites over to a new CMS. The links are being picked up from somewhere so the best thing to do is create a 301 redirect if there is a valuable similar page to the 404. The only other option is to lose possible link juice from where ever the link is coming from. It's always better to have a pure link (no 301) but if you can't contact the original link then there is nothing you can do.
I'm curious as to where the links come from as well. Maybe someone will be able to speak to that.
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
-
Clarification on indexation of XML sitemaps within Webmaster Tools
Hi Mozzers, I have a large service based website, which seems to be losing pages within Google's index. Whilst working on the site, I noticed that there are a number of xml sitemaps for each of the services. So I submitted them to webmaster tools last Friday (14th) and when I left they were "pending". On returning to the office today, they all appear to have been successfully processed on either the 15th or 17th and I can see the following data: 13/08 - Submitted=0 Indexed=0
Technical SEO | | Silkstream
14/08 - Submitted=606,733 Indexed=122,243
15/08 - Submitted=606,733 Indexed=494,651
16/08 - Submitted=606,733 Indexed=517,527
17/08 - Submitted=606,733 Indexed=517,498 Question 1: The indexed pages on 14th of 122,243 - Is this how many pages were previously indexed? Before Google processed the sitemaps? As they were not marked processed until 15th and 17th? Question 2: The indexed pages are already slipping, I'm working on fixing the site by reducing pages and improving internal structure and content, which I'm hoping will fix the crawling issue. But how often will Google crawl these XML sitemaps? Thanks in advance for any help.0 -
Huge uptick in 404s on new website
I just launched a new website, and I see that the 404s shot up hugely in Google Webmaster Tools right during the launch. We went from Drupal to WordPress, but I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts on whether these 404s represent a crisis, or potentially something harmless? There has been no noticeable SEO downtick in terms of keywords or queries during the same period... Thanks for any thoughts. Screenshot-2015-05-19-13.58.55.png
Technical SEO | | yoursearchteam0 -
Google webmaster tools says access denied for 77 urls
Hi i am looking in google webmaster tools and i have seen a major problem which i hope people can help me sort out. The problem is, i am being told that 77 urls are being denied access. The message when i look for more information says the below Googlebot couldn't crawl your URL because your server either requires login to access the page, or is blocking Googlebot from accessing your site. the responce code is 403 here is a couple of examples http://www.in2town.co.uk/Entertainment-Magazine http://www.in2town.co.uk/Weight-Loss-Hypnotherapy-helped-woman-lose-3-stone i think the problem could be that i have sent them to another url in my httaccess file using the 403 re-direct but why would it bring up that google bot could not crawl them any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
How is Google finding our preview subdomains?
I've noticed that Google is able to find, crawl and index preview subdomains we set up for new client sites (e.g. clientpreview.example.com). I know now to use "meta name="robots" and robots.txt) to block the search engines from crawling these subdomains. My question though, is how is Google finding these subdomains? We don't link to these preview domains from anywhere else, so I can't figure out how Google is even getting there. Does anybody have any insight on this?
Technical SEO | | ZeeCreative0 -
Google Webmaster Tool - Crawl Stats Query ?
Dear All, I have been looking at GWT Crawl Stats and wondering how should I be interrupting the crawl stats chart. AllI I see is 3 charts telling me a high , low and average for the below but I am wondering is there anything I really need to be looking for ?. Pages crawled per day Kilobytes downloaded per day Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds) thanks Sarah
Technical SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
SEOMoz is finding jpegs on my site and reporting them as pages with missing meta titles
SEOMoz has just done a crawl of my site, and found 600 pages with missing meta title errors. When I have checked the list of these pages, they are all jpegs and not pages. Why is SEOMoz reporting that this .jpg files have missing meta titles on my site, which is www.webmakercms.com? SEOMoz has run several crawls of my site and this is the first time it has brought up this list of jpegs as errors and I don't understand why?
Technical SEO | | mfrgolfgti1 -
Magento - Google Webmaster Crawl Errors
Hi guys, Started my free trial - very impressed - just thought I'd ask a question or two while I can. I've set up the website for http://www.worldofbooks.com (large bookseller in the UK), using Magento. I'm getting a huge amount of not found crawl errors (27,808), I think this is due to URL rewrites, all the errors are in this format (non search friendly): http://www.worldofbooks.com/search_inventory.php?search_text=&category=&tag=Ure&gift_code=&dd_sort_by=price_desc&dd_records_per_page=40&dd_page_number=1 As oppose to this format: http://www.worldofbooks.com/arts-books/history-of-art-design-styles/the-art-book-by-phaidon.html (the re-written URL). This doesn't seem to really be affecting our rankings, we targeted 'cheap books' and 'bargain books' heavily - we're up to 2nd for Cheap Books and 3rd for Bargain Books. So my question is - are these large amount of Crawl errors cause for concern or is it something that will work itself out? And secondly - if it is cause for concern will it be affecting our rankings negatively in any way and what could we do to resolve this issue? Any points in the right direction much appreciated. If you need any more clarification regarding any points I've raised just let me know. Benjamin Edwards
Technical SEO | | Benj250 -
Google Web Master Tools - Keyword Variants & misspelling
We have millions of urls and the technical expertise to write code to fix the spelling of keyword variants Google has discovered and shows us in Web Master tools. Since Google has recognized these as variants, is it worth our time to write code that will fix the spelling of obvious misses?
Technical SEO | | snoopcat0