404-like content in webmaster tools
-
Hello
this is so strange i have just noticed when looking in webmastertools
there are some pages of our website it is showing like 404-like content but in reality the page is getting 200 response and it is good.
but why does google read that as 404-like content! we have product information and image of the product and even buy button in the page..
not only product pages but also for some content pages it showing 404-like content!
thanks in advance for your valuable opinions on the topic..
-
really appreciated your time and advice. i respect your opinons. actually i just wanted to give a example (target) for why we are using all these subcategories at the top.
we are not satisfied with the google rank and this is actually a new design of our site. its been just a week days since we are using this new system and the template.
by considering your words now i am rethinking and surely will need to take actions.
-
You are comparing your site with Target which is not an equivalent site. Target has a DA of 95 which is amongst the highest on the internet. Your site does not have the authority to make such a system work, and likely never will. That's nothing wrong with your site. 99% of the sites on the internet don't have a DA that high.
Another question before comparing yourself with Target. How is their SEO? Don't assume because they are a large retailer in the physical world that their online SEO is good. Have you tried searching for "Buy TV" or "Buy Television" and checking where Target ranks? I see stores like Circuit City and Best Buy ranking on the first page, but not Target.
How about more specific searches for common products? When I search for a popular brand which Target sells, I don't see them on the first page of results, but I see their competitors. Try searching for "phillips 32" tv" or "buy phillips 32" tv".
Also, look at Target's own menu for "TVs". They offer a link to their "TVs and Video" category (under Electronics) and to "TVs". Target has a MUCH larger selection and they do not break down "TVs" the way you do into the various types.
There are two things to consider with respect to your links. The first is useability. Take a look at your Google Analytics. It will show exactly how frequently each of your links is being used. I am willing to bet most of your 266 links are almost never used. That should indicate a need for change.
The second consideration is flow of PR throughout your site. You offer a link to "MP3" and "iPods", but then you also offer a link to 260 other items. Are the other items you are linking to less important? Because you are flowing the same amount of link juice to everything, which means that your more important pages receive almost none. Why? Because you are sharing your link juice with other pages which are not as important.
You are welcome to disregard the suggestion I shared. It is my advice to you, but you are in control of the site. The question is, are you happy with your rankings in Google presently? If so, keep doing what you are doing. If not, something needs to change. You could leave your navigation in tact and work on other aspects of your site, but 266 links on a site with such a low DA stands out as a major concern.
-
this is the complete url http://www.digitalcompring.com/imagen-sonido/55318-ue55d7000-8806071261218.html..
few days back we tried one module to make the url a bit beautiful what that module done was removed the numbers at the end of the url. but it slowed the very much so we disabled it..
some what i cant agree with this statement
////////
If you offer 250+ links on a page it can be difficult for users to locate a useful link. If you only offer 50 links on the page, users will have a lot easier time finding what they need.
///////////
because the links which we gave in the menu are making it is very easy for the client to get what he want every easily.. for example if one client is looking for LED tv he can just go to that sub category in tv's with out much difficulty. same case with every subcategory.. if you take games section... if the client is looking for ps3 console or games he can navigate there very easily.. we designed that menu mainly to keep it easy for the client..
i can give you some big brands for example who are using the same thing for example
http://www.pixmania.com/es/es/home.html
but what i see in target product pages is there are many comments of clients for each product. i guess this will make difference ?
-
This other link you are sharing is much better with respect to content. You are up to 228 words of unique content. It is still very thin on content.
With respect to the 404 issue, the URL you shared with me (the one receiving the 404 notice in WMT) is:
www.digitalcompring.com/imagen-sonido/55318-ue55d7000.html
When I enter that URL I am taken to the following page:
http://www.digitalcompring.com/imagen-sonido/55318-ue55d7000-8806071261218.html
I still receive a 200 header response code. Your server is changing the URL and I can't see the actual URL you listed.
With respect to links, if you value SEO at all you need to remove most of the links on the page. One step is you can link to the categories instead of the sub-categories and individual pages. For example you presently link to the "Televisions" category then offer links for "Televisions 3D", "Televisions Internet", "Televisions HD" and so forth. Simply link to the "Televisions" category and remove all the sub-category links.
Check your Google WMT and see which links are not used. If you offer 250+ links on a page it can be difficult for users to locate a useful link. If you only offer 50 links on the page, users will have a lot easier time finding what they need.
-
thank you so much for the detailed explanation..
i have given one more page too which it is showing 404 alike
http://www.digitalcompring.com/imagen-sonido/55318-ue55d7000-8806071261218.html
this got many words. but the only reason i can see is we have way too many link in the page..
but how to reduce them ? the link on the top menu is important o us. because it gives good look to the website..
any suggestions would be welcome on how to reduce the links on our pages.
once again thank you so much Ryan and others who replied
much appreciated..
-
Ravi, the likely root-cause of your issue is poor page design.
The page you shared (http://www.digitalcompring.com/aire-y-clima/1022-bp-3100.html) has 28 words of unique text in the main content area, that's it.
Try counting every word on the page. Include all of the header, the footer, the side bar. When examining the header include every word in each of the drop down menus. Also include the "Commentarios" tab which has a bit of text and shows zero comments. When you are finished, that is the amount of duplicated content which appears on every page of your site.
Now look at the main content area. The "Mas" tab starts with "Caracteristicas" which is common to every page, then shows 27 unique words. Above that area is the main product image with perhaps 20 unique words.
You page offers 266 links! That is a lot. A normal 404 page has a few words at the top "Sorry we can't find the page you are looking for" along with links to other pages on the site. Basically your current page does not appear as a unique web page which should be indexed. I would advise greatly reducing your links on the page (try to keep under 100) and greatly increasing your content. The product seems to be a space heater. More pictures of the product, more description of it's usage, etc. I hate to offer anything word-count related but try to at least get 500 unique words on the page.
-
i am sorry but i didn't understand what we should do to rectify these errors. in google webmaster tools..
as it is reading our good 200 ok pages as 404-like content...
-
What I am getting at is, some sites trap a 404, and then decide to return a page depending on the url, this was popular in the old days. where really you ned to do this much earlier in the event cycle.
This often a cause of soft 404s
-
actually we use prestashop and i guess it is automatically creating..
-
Why does this page give a 301 then a 404
http://www.digitalcompring.com/fasfasdfasAre you creating these 404 like pages dynamicly, or is there actualy a static page tha the address
-
actually we kept the site for few hours in maintainence mode..
these are some pages
| http://www.digitalcompring.com/aire-y-clima/1022-bp-3100.html | 404-like content | Nov 8, 2011 |
| http://www.digitalcompring.com/internet-tv/55318-ue55d7000.html | 404-like content | Nov 8, 2011 |
and more...
i would like take this opportunity to ask one more question also... can you guys please check the page and give me some feedback to improve the SEO also ?
thanks
-
If you share the URL we can offer more specific feedback.
In general, look at the top of the page. Is there any text along the lines of "Oops...we can't find the page you are looking for"?
If a page returns a 200 response code but the crawl of the page indicates the page seems like a 404 page, Google will identify it as "404-like" content in WMT.
-
I have also had this problem when the site goes down for maintenance - it says there are 404s etc. Have you taken the site or any pages down recently and then put them back up?
A
-
I assume you are atlking about the soft 404 errors in GWMT
A soft 404 is a page that returns a 200 when it should return a 404.
Can we get a url?
there is a quict test you can do, see if this returns a 200 or a 404
some websites use the 404 page to do url-rewriting or some other reason, this causes a soft 404.
From what I have read, Google can test if you are doing this buy requesting anonsecne url, and see if it returns a 404 or a 200. if it returns a 200 then they look at your pages more closly.
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
-
Duplicate content through product variants
Hi, Before you shout at me for not searching - I did and there are indeed lots of threads and articles on this problem. I therefore realise that this problem is not exactly new or unique. The situation: I am dealing with a website that has 1 to N (n being between 1 and 6 so far) variants of a product. There are no dropdown for variants. This is not technically possible short of a complete redesign which is not on the table right now. The product variants are also not linked to each other but share about 99% of content (obvious problem here). In the "search all" they show up individually. Each product-variant is a different page, unconnected in backend as well as frontend. The system is quite limited in what can be added and entered - I may have some opportunity to influence on smaller things such as enabling canonicals. In my opinion, the optimal choice would be to retain one page for each product, the base variant, and then add dropdowns to select extras/other variants. As that is not possible, I feel that the best solution is to canonicalise all versions to one version (either base variant or best-selling product?) and to offer customers a list at each product giving him a direct path to the other variants of the product. I'd be thankful for opinions, advice or showing completely new approaches I have not even thought of! Kind Regards, Nico
Technical SEO | | netzkern_AG0 -
Duplicate content problem
Hi there, I have a couple of related questions about the crawl report finding duplicate content: We have a number of pages that feature mostly media - just a picture or just a slideshow - with very little text. These pages are rarely viewed and they are identified as duplicate content even though the pages are indeed unique to the user. Does anyone have an opinion about whether or not we'd be better off to just remove them since we do not have the time to add enough text at this point to make them unique to the bots? The other question is we have a redirect for any 404 on our site that follows the pattern immigroup.com/news/* - the redirect merely sends the user back to immigroup.com/news. However, Moz's crawl seems to be reading this as duplicate content as well. I'm not sure why that is, but is there anything we can do about this? These pages do not exist, they just come from someone typing in the wrong url or from someone clicking on a bad link. But we want the traffic - after all the users are landing on a page that has a lot of content. Any help would be great! Thanks very much! George
Technical SEO | | canadageorge0 -
WebMaster Tools keeps showing old 404 error but doesn't show a "Linked From" url. Why is that?
Hello Moz Community. I have a question about 404 crawl errors in WebmasterTools, a while ago we had an internal linking problem regarding some links formed in a wrong way (a loop was making links on the fly), this error was identified and fixed back then but before it was fixed google got to index lots of those malformed pages. Recently we see in our WebMaster account that some of this links still appearing as 404 but we currently don't have that issue or any internal link pointing to any of those URLs and what confuses us even more is that WebMaster doesn't show anything in the "Linked From" tab where it usually does for this type of errors, so we are wondering what this means, could be that they still in google's cache or memory? we are not really sure. If anyone has an idea of what this errors showing up now means we would really appreciate the help. Thanks. jZVh7zt.png
Technical SEO | | revimedia1 -
SEOMOZ and Webmaster Tools showing Different Page Index Results
I am promoting a jewelry e-commerce website. The website has about 600 pages and the SEOMOZ page index report shows this number. However, webmaster tools shows about 100,000 indexed pages. I have no idea why this is happening and I am sure this is hurting the page rankings in Google. Any ideas? Thanks, Guy
Technical SEO | | ciznerguy1 -
Duplicate Content
We have a ton of duplicate content/title errors on our reports, many of them showing errors of: http://www.mysite.com/(page title) and http://mysite.com/(page title) Our site has been set up so that mysite.com 301 redirects to www.mysite.com (we did this a couple years ago). Is it possible that I set up my campaign the wrong way in SEOMoz? I'm thinking it must be a user error when I set up the campaign since we already have the 301 Redirect. Any advice is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Ditigal_Taylor0 -
Duplicate Content Vs No Content
Hello! A question that has been throw around a lot at our company has been "Is duplicate content better than no content?". We operate a range of online flash game sites, most of which pull their games from a feed, which includes the game description. We have unique content written on the home page of the website, but aside from that, the game descriptions are the only text content on the website. We have been hit by both Panda and Penguin, and are in the process of trying to recover from both. In this effort we are trying to decide whether to remove or keep the game descriptions. I figured the best way to settle the issue would be to ask here. I understand the best solution would be to replace the descriptions with unique content, however, that is a massive task when you've got thousands of games. So if you have to choose between duplicate or no content, which is better for SEO? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Ryan_Phillips0 -
Webmaster Tools Site Map Question
I have TLD that has authority and a number of micro-sites built off of the primary domain. All sites relate to the same topic, as I am promoting a destination. The primary site and each micro-site have their own CMS installation, but the domains are mapped accordingly. www.regionalsite.com/ <- primary
Technical SEO | | VERBInteractive
www.regioanlsite.com/theme1/ <- theme 1
www.regioanlsite.com/theme2/ <- theme 2
www.regionalsite.com/theme3/ <- theme 3 Question: Should my XML site map for Webmaster Tools feed all sites off of the primary domain site map or are there penalties for this? Thanks.0 -
Duplicate content on my home
Hello, I have duplication with my home page. It comes in two versions of the languages: French and English. http://www.numeridanse.tv/fr/ http://www.numeridanse.tv/en/ You should know that the home page are not directories : http://www.numeridanse.tv/ Google indexes the three versions: http://bit.ly/oqKT0H To avoid duplicating what is the best solution?
Technical SEO | | android_lyon
Have a version of the default language? Thanks a lot for your answers. Take care. A.0