MOZ indicates 404 page and 0 backlinks, after 301 redirect. The best redirect solution?
-
Dear MOZers,
I have one concern i would like to ask you..
My website have valuable backlinks to the most important page which is awesome. But, some of those backlinks is old URL which is 301 redirected to the URL I use today. As far as i know 301 redirects pass page rank, so it should be alright. (?)
Link i use today: domain.com/awesome-url/
My backlink: domain.com/old-boring-url/ 301 redirected to domain.com/awesome-url/
What bothers me is that in MOZ report (Link opportunities) MOZ indicates my important URL (domain.com/old-boring-url/) return 404. But, it is not true. It is 301 redirected to domain.com/awesome-url/ and it works! I am worried i am losing important link juice here(!?)
Also, my On Page Grader tool for domain.com/awesome-url/ reports 0 backlinks. And that is not true! I know exactly which websites are linking back, only problem is that those website are using old URL (domain.com/old-boring-url/) to link back to my website.
Am i doing something wrong? Is there a better way to redirect and save valuable link juice for my page?
Thank you very much!
PS
The URL was changed in March 2015.
-
Hi Kevin,
Thank you very much for help. I have sent you an email.
Regards, Dusan
-
Hi Dusan!
If you're still having issues, can you send us your URLs to [email protected] so we can take a look and see what's going on?
Thanks!
Kevin
Help Team -
Thanks Dirk, i'm on my way home right now. Will do what you recommend later today, and will let you know how it goes.
Cheers
-
Could be that the problem is only occurring in Moz and that in the "real" world there is no issue. Did you see these 404 errors as well in Google Search Console? You could try to visit the "old" url with js disabled & with the Moz user agent ( rogerbot/1.0 (http://moz.com/help/pro/what-is-rogerbot-, [email protected]) ) to try to simulate what's happening.
Other way of checking could be to check your server log files for rogerbot & try to check there where the 404 response is coming from. A basic guide on how to do that can be found here: https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/technical-seo-log-analysis)
Without actual url it's difficult to figure out what the problem could be - if you don't want to publish it here you could send it in private message.
Dirk
-
Dirk, thank you for the reply.
I did check the URL via web-sniffer, the http status is 301 moved permanently**.**
Why is it than that MOZ sees it as 404, i don't understand? Also how can I retrieve the value from those backlinks?
Thanks, Dusan
-
Hi
Did you check the http response of domain.com/old-boring-url/ with a tool like web-sniffer.net? It could very well be that you are being redirected when you try to access the url in your browser but that the header is giving a 404 reply.
If Moz only sees a 404 on that url - the backlinks of domain.com/old-boring-url/ will not be counted as backlinks for domain.com/awesome-url/
Dirk
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
-
Best Methods and Tools for Monitoring your Website's Backlinks
Recently, I've launched two websites. I want to make sure I'm doing a good job monitoring our link building efforts. I'm see a lot of tools out there to supplement my use of Open Site Explorer. What I want to know is what tools I should be using to monitor my links? My ultimate goal would be to have the data to track the number of links I'm adding a month so that I can use it for reporting. There is another layer. Because the sites are new, OSE is actually not reporting any links found. I can only find reported links through Google Search Console. Any advice? Is this something where I will just have to wait for everything to get indexed?
Link Building | | JasonKhoo0 -
Link to page in SERP or page with good on-page optimisation
Hi, Some friends are happy to link to my site. As I am focusing on a particular search term is it best to have them link to the page that already appears in the SERP for that term or the one with better on page optimisation? Thanks Billy
Link Building | | Brighton-Soundsystem0 -
I have well over 110 identical backlinks of widely varying quality - is it worth taking the page they're linking to down?
The site on which I'm working has been experiencing a month-to-month decline since the Panda and Penguin updates - I didn't get an unnatural links notification, but have clearly fallen off the face of Google with many of the more important rankings. After running a scan on my backlinks, I found over 110 identical backlinks (it looks like the same medical definition and my website is listed in the endnotes as a source - just the URL, not anchor text), some from reputable websites with high pageranks and others that look very 'spammy.' We've redesigned the architecture of the site, so the actual link itself has a 301 redirect on it, but I'm just wondering exactly how much of a liability is it to have these links out there? I'm guessing it's an all or nothing kind of thing given the identical content on each page - on one hand, I'm pretty frantic to get to the root of the Google penalties and get back in their good graces. On the other hand, I don't want to kill the site completely by going after a set of valuable links. Has anyone dealt with this before?
Link Building | | travis-taylor0 -
Which Backlinks to Disavow?
I am a site owner just getting to learn more about managing things myself after outsourcing SEO to a firm a year back (they stopped all activities about 8 months back). The question I have is about disavowing the low quality links. After collecting all the data from many sites on the basis of this helpful posting - (http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal), I am now left with around 2,800 back-links. I discovered most of the bad ones using ahrefs and majestic (and Google webmaster did not show many of the bad links). In fact, in the very first place, I realized that there was a spam problem when I saw the anchor cloud on ahrefs which showed many unrelated anchors for my site. I have three questions: **First, **Many URL's are actually from websites which have nothing to do with my line of business and I can sure spot them. What I get confused with is this - I can not say that these sites are downright spam. Some of them look to be good sites for example - a coffee machine vendor (with full business details and a fairly decent looking business), a Nike sports shoes mart etc. But they have nothing to do with my business. So my first question is - What is spam really? Would a back link from a high ranking website in the travel industry be considered spam from the point of view of someone who runs a website for medical equipment, specially if the back-link is from an unrelated anchor text like - "3 nights travel package" (which has nothing to do with medical business). I think I should disavow all the low quality back links with an erroneous anchor but Id like some views on this. Second, I see that in the disavow file, one could either upload a whole domain or a specific URL (could somebody please confirm this). I have some sites which have 8-12 (more in some cases) back links to my site. In most cases these sites are either really bad quality or have nothing to do with my business. I am tempted to disavow the entire domain for such sites instead of going by the URL's. Any views? Third, this is what I'd really like some help with. In case I delete the very pages (on my site) to which these back links point, should I still disavow the pointing domain? Finally: I have not created most of these backlinks. In fact, over the last 2-3 months we have started creating links from good sites in my industry. Most of the anchor cloud is good for me on ahrefs but there are these bad ones to which my question relates. I have not got any manual penalty from Google, though my traffic I think took a hit in the first week of October 2013.
Link Building | | sanar0 -
What should be the ration of inbound link between Home page and Internal pages?
What should be the ration of inbound link between Home page and Internal pages? And also wanted to clear my doubt, suppose My website is related to Technology niche with different technologies like PHP, Java etc. Is this better idea to submit internal PHP page link in PHP related directories? Although I know that in the most of the directories have very large number of categories.
Link Building | | Perfect0070 -
Where do I get backlinks?
Three months ago I made the "foolish" decision to launch an insurance quote website (didn't think of looking into how competitive insurance websites were before investing my time, money and energy). Due to budget costs, I have been forced to learn about SEO. At this point I would say I am at the Peon level. lol. Today I signed up for SEOmoz and have found that my competitors have TENS OF THOUSANDS of backlinks. To logical people, this would be enough to throw in the towel. Not me. I'm stupid. I have spent many many hours over the last few months creating backlinks (at least I thought I was). However, I want to start targeting the sites that my competitors are using because they are getting anchor texts. How do I do this? How do websites create so many back links? Some of my competitors have 50,000 backlinks! I know this won't be done overnight. I appreciate all the help the SEOmoz community can offer a Peon like myself. One day I promise to pay it forward.
Link Building | | rivercityransom0 -
Backlinks on an older domain which is now 301
Hi What is the best way to see what backlinks one of my domains has pointing at it? It is an older domain and is no longer being used for marketing purposes and has a 301 redirect on it. However when looking at this older domain in opensiteexplorer it does not show what the links are because it redirects to the newer domain name
Link Building | | ocelot0 -
Multiple links to dead pages
I have just taken over a client and have been shocked to see a lot of wasted 'link juice' from hundreds of websites linking to old/dead pages within my client's domain. My question is - what is the best method to re-capture that juice given that it is impractical to change the links at source. Thanks.
Link Building | | driansmith0