Too many broken links which i am unable to understand
-
Dear All,
There are some links which are cropping up again and again in my google webmaster tools. I am using wordpress and genesis theme. Both are upgraded to the latest version. But there are 3 types of errors being created as mentioned below.
tag/target-markets/%E2%80%9Dhttp:/www.wordpress.org%E2%80%9D
tag/smartphone-apps/%E2%80%9Dhttp:/%E2%80%9Dhttp:/www.marketing91.com%E2%80%9D
how-to-maintain-customer-interest/%3C?php%20the_permalink()%20?%3E
As you can see, either wordpress.orf or marketing91.com or php%20 the _permalink is being added at the end of URLs and they are breaking. This cannot be seen in google index. But this indicates wrong coding and due to it my traffic is regularly dropping. Can you tell me what is causing the break in URL like above.
My website is http://www.marketing91.com
Thanks in advance. This has being going on for 2 months
Hope someone comes out with the right answer.
-
These look like simple broken links, often caused by using relative paths incorrectly or forgetting to include http:// when linking to a website (e.g. which will then make the link look like this to a spider http://www.yourdopmain.com/www.someotherdomain.com.</p>
<p>In your case it looks like there are some HTML URL encoding issues too. <strong>%E2 %80 %9D</strong> is a string used to encode a right quotation mark, and <strong>%E2 %80 %9C</strong> is a string used to encode a left quotation mark.</p>
<p>I'm going to assume that your content management system is adding this code, possibly when content is being copied and pasted from another CMS, word processing software, website builder, etc...</p>
<p>You can fix it by replacing that code with a standard ASCII )which will then make the link look like this to a spider http://www.yourdopmain.com/www.someotherdomain.com.</p>
<p>In your case it looks like there are some HTML URL encoding issues too. <strong>%E2 %80 %9D</strong> is a string used to encode a right quotation mark, and <strong>%E2 %80 %9C</strong> is a string used to encode a left quotation mark.</p>
<p>I'm going to assume that your content management system is adding this code, possibly when content is being copied and pasted from another CMS, word processing software, website builder, etc...</p>
<p>You can fix it by replacing that code with a standard ASCII ) -
Adding so many 301's to these pages is a bit difficult because a) every week there are more and more of these pages. there are 50 such errors in a single day. and the same is repeated every week. b) too many 301s might also hamper my site and google might look at it negatively
BUT more importantly, DO YOU THINK that this is a reason for traffic drops? These links are not being indexed by google. Neither are they linked from anywhere. DO you think that these links are transient and may pass away with time?
your reply will be appreciated.
-
I just ran a spider on your site and saw no 404s from that crawl so there were no links on your site pointing to the URLs. Also, like you said, those URLs are not in the Google index. I checked your sitemap. You reference a zipped sitemap in your robots.txt http://www.marketing91.com/sitemap.xml.gz vs http://www.marketing91.com/sitemap.xml but not sure that this makes a difference.
You need to trace back to when you saw the errors showing up and see if you did anything to your site at the time. Did all of this show up when you updated themes or made some other change? It may be that you used to have these URLs on the old version of the site and when you made changes the pages went away and now Google is trying to change them. In that case, it may not be the 404 errors that are causing the problem, but something else when you updated.
It may be that you need to setup some "Catch all" 301 redirects so that when garbage gets added to the end of your URLs they 301 to the correct page. That would help clean this up, but not sure this is the reason you are losing traffic from Google.
Honestly, these are just guesses and so I hope that they may trigger something else for you to check.
Good luck.
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
-
Nofollow links to own website pages
To preserve link juice should I "nofollow" links to about us and contact us pages that appear at the top of our navigation? I read this article - but I am not familiar with the authenticity: http://www.eminentseo.com/blog/navigation-menu-optimization-best-practices/ Thanks Mike
On-Page Optimization | | henandstag0 -
Disavowed links, updated website etc - still no ranking improvements
Hi, Could anyone take a look at www.artificialgrass4u.co.uk - a few years ago it used to rank highly for 'artificial grass' ... then when Google rolled out its algorithms punishing websites with poor links it lost all it's rankings. We've disavowed almost all of the bad links, and have been adding new optimised content etc over the past few months but rankings still haven't improved. Is there anything I'm missing? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | icansee0 -
Internal linking question
I have a Q&A site which I am struggling to get ranking well in Google. I had a few questions 1. Should I be doing some internal linking and if so how is it best to do this? Should I go back into users questions and change certain keywords to links if applicable? 2. Should I be nofollowing the index pages ie /p1 /p2 of discussions? 3. If anyone has chance to look at the site and let me know if there is anything else I am doing wrong I would be really grateful. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | oliboy0 -
Broken links detected by SEOMOZ
hi there, the SEOMOZ crawl has detected two "broken links" : http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/feed/
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr
http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/comments/feed/ how can I fix the problem? I know that these two links are related to the user's subscription (hypothetical) to my website updates. Thanks in advanced.0 -
Can a page lose ranking because it has too many bold tags?
I run a product search website for the Engineering Sector. Each of the companies listed on the website has a profile page. This page used to rank very well in google. Over the last couple of weeks these pages disappeared for google i.e they fell about 20 to 30 spots in the search results for relevant keywords like the Manufacturer Name. I was trying to analyze the page and found that Each of the Categories that the manufacturer supports was listed in "bold" and linked to the page for that category. A manufacturer can support up to 20 or 30 categories so this results in about 20 or 30 Bold keywords. Is this a bad practice? Could this be a reason for a drop in ranking or do bold keywords on a page not matter? What are your views?
On-Page Optimization | | raghavkapur0 -
How many outbound links is too many outbound links?
As a part of our SEO strategy, we have been focusing on writing several high quality articles with unique content. In these articles we regularly link to other websites when they are high quality, authoritative sites. Typically, the articles are 500 words or more and have 3-5 outbound links, but in some cases there are as many as 7 or 8 outbound links. Before we get too carried away with outbound links, I wanted to get some opinions on how many outbound links we should be trying to include and more information on how the outbound links work. Do they pass our website's authority on to the other website? Could our current linking strategy cause future SEO problems? Finally, do you have any suggestions for guidelines we should be using? Thank you for your help!
On-Page Optimization | | airnwater0 -
Blocking Google seeing outbound links?
Apart from rewriting the outbound url to look like a folder 'abc.co.uk/out/link1' and blocking the folder 'out' in the robots.txt file, along with also nofollowing the links as well, is there anything else you can do?
On-Page Optimization | | activitysuper0 -
Internal Linking
Hi Everyone, Should i be careful of how many internal links I have on one page? For example if i have a page that contains 700 words, can i have 5, 10, 15 internal links linking to other pages on my website? Is there a ratio for best practice. I know that internal linking is important for spiders to crawl your website but at the same time dont make it look spammy. I hope this makes sense. Thanks for any help.
On-Page Optimization | | Paul780