404 errors High Priority Issues in Moz Pro: change to 301 or not ?
-
Hi there,
Moz Pro is showing us 404 errors on our site as High Priority Issues. These 404 errors regard deleted product pages, which we did not 301. Should we 301 them all backwards ?
We have an ecommerce site. After reading How Should You Handle Expired Content? on Moz and a few other Q&A discussions I now know we should 301 each expired url and now we do so. My concern is with what was done in the past, and what we should do about it:
- for the past few years we have been leaving the pages on the site, creating a big amount of outdated url's without either content nor traffic
- in march our IT decided to delete these url's, and ask for a webpage removal in Google Search Console: we 301 only a 40 url's and 404 the other 3500
- now 6 monthts after, we still have 2500 crawl errors in the Search Console, and Moz Pro finding each week new 404 errors
Our SEO consultant says we should not bother about the errors shown in the Search Console. But I am concerned about these errors not reducing, and about Moz Pro High Priority Issues: should we 301 the url's to similar categories or products?
-
Hi Joe,
When running a scan to find error pages or bad internal linked pages, what type of scan parameters do you use? This could make sense on why I'm seeing these strange 404 error strings, such as http://website.com/ http://www.website.com/cubic-zirconia-1/ Ideas, have you seen this before?
run a Screaming Frog scan
-
Hey Isabelle - which do you not know how to check, the analytics for those 3,500 pages or the links to them?
For the analytics you'll just go back in time to when those pages were receiving traffic and check. To check the individual pages for backlinks pointing directly to them, you'll want to use Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, or Majestic to get that data. Using at least 2 of those will give you the best data on which pages are getting links.
I would investigate as to which metrics Moz Pro is using to decide if those pages are high priority to fix. It could be that Moz Pro is basing the high priority signal on the backlinks, so dive deeper into that to find out what's triggering that and then fix that problem!
-
Hi Joe,
Thank you so much for your answer. As a matter of fact much of these 3,500 pages don't receive much traffic anymore, but a lot of them have natural external links since they were product pages. The problem is, I don't know how to check it.
Your informations regarding the Search Console are usefull, so I will have to live with it being full of crawl errors. But what should I do with MOZ PRO showing some of the 404 as High Priority Issues? Does it actually mean, that those url's are somehow important and should be 301 redirect? So is MOZ PRO more liable than the Search Console on this point?
-
Hey Isabelle,
From the How Should You Handle Expired Content? post, I agree that those 4 steps outlined are the best questions to ask:
- Was there significant traffic (and not just organic, but also consider direct) coming to this page?
- How can we provide the best user experience?
- Has this page received external links? How is this page currently internally linked to?
- Is there content/resources on the page that users would still find useful?
Were those 40 pages you chose to 301 the only pages that were receiving any type of traffic, or are there perhaps more out of the other 3,500?
If some of those 3,500 pages have links from external websites linking to them, make it a high priority to 301 redirect those URLs to related category or product pages.
If some of those 3,500 pages are receiving decent amounts of visits to them still (you can see this in Google Analytics) then you can consider 301 redirecting those to improve UX and recover some traffic that may be bouncing. Set a threshold depending on the size of your site, maybe only recover URLs that have more than 10 visits a month or so.
As far as seeing the errors in Search Console, it can be annoying sometimes, but Google shows a lot of stuff as informational and it doesn't necessarily need to be acted upon. Here's a related question on Moz about that. If the pages are long gone, you don't have to worry about Google showing them.
But if you're wondering how Google is discovering these, it's possible there are old sitemaps they're crawling, or even pages on your site that link to those old pages. Definitely run a Screaming Frog scan on your site to try and uncover those.
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
-
50,000 4xx errors listed in MOZ report :(
HI, I've just had a look at a customers MOZ report and discovered nearly 50,000 errors listed!! The site is a non dynamic, non database driven site so where these have come from is beyond me. Example - (Both links open in a new window)
Moz Pro | | Skips
LIVE PAGE - http://lunnonwaste.com/licenses/Heatherland-Limited-H&S-Policy-Document-JAN-15.pdf
NON EXISTANT PAGE - http://lunnonwaste.com/licenses/licenses/Heatherland-Limited-H&S-Policy-Document-JAN-15.pdf - if you hover over any links you'll see they're ALL ......./licenses/licenses/.......... which doesn't exist! It's the file system that seems to be the problem - .........../licenses/licenses/........... and this gets added onto (............./licenses/licenses/licenses/licenses/.............. , up to the 50,000 page errors LOL The problem is self replicating. It's very odd and not something I've ever seen before, NON of these 'extra' pages are listed on the server, so where are they coming from? Any suggestions or help would be gratefully appreciated1 -
Could my Crawl Error Report be wrong?
HI there, I am using Yoast SEO plugin on a wordpress website. I am currently showing 70 Med priority crawl errors 'missing meta description' on my Moz pro account. This number of missing meta descriptions has increased over the last 6 weeks. But every single page / post / tag / category has both the title and meta description completed via Yoast. I requested a google bot to crawl the site a few weeks ago as thought it perhaps wasn't been crawled and updated. Any idea what the issue might be? Could the Moz report be incorrect for some reason? Or could something be blocking Moz / Google from seeing the Yoast plugin?
Moz Pro | | skehoe0 -
How to remove 404 pages wordpress
I used the crawl tool and it return a 404 error for several pages that I no longer have published in Wordpress. They must still be on the server somewhere? Do you know how to remove them? I think they are not a file on the server like an html file since Wordpress uses databases? I figure that getting rid of the 404 errors will improve SEO is this correct? Thanks, David
Moz Pro | | DJDavid0 -
Twitter and G+ MOZ not tracking
Our company site TW and G+ accounts are not being tracked by MOZ although they are connected with MOZ. Can someone please look into this?
Moz Pro | | US-Chemical-Storage0 -
Why are my keyword rankings dramatically changing week to week?
I have a site (actual several) that has been up for many years now. Content is changed monthly - regularly. It would always rank in the top 5 positions for 5 or 6 keywords. Now all of a sudden (without any dramatic changes to the website) my ranking results from my weekly Moz reports are dramatically different from week to week - every week. One Keyword will be #1, then the next week it will drop 49 positions, the 3rd week it might be #5, then Not in the Top 50, then #1 again, and so and so on. This happens to all my keywords on my site. I was waiting for Google to finish it's changes to it's algorithms but it's now been long enough and I can't get a handle on what's happening, why it's happening, and what to do about it, and what direction to take with my SEO. My Traffic has actually improved over last year by approx. 25%, but I have also started a PPC campaign for this client. Any suggestions would be great.
Moz Pro | | SummitCom0 -
Why is my MOZ ranking better but my ranking worse
last week, I made all the recommended changes for my client's website, and our grade according to MOZ got better, but our rankings dropped?
Moz Pro | | lfrazer0 -
Advice for 4000+ duplicate errors on 1st check
Hi, 1st time use of the SEOMOZ scan has thrown up a lot of duplicate errors. Seems to look like my site has a .com.au/ & .com.au/default for the same pages. We had the domain on a hosted cms solution & have now migrated to magento. We duplicated the pages, but had to redirect all of the old url's to he new magento structure. This was done via a developer adding a 301 wildcard code to the .htaccess. Would that many errors be normal for a 1st scan? Where should I look for someone to fix them? Thanks
Moz Pro | | Paul_MC0 -
SEOMoz Q&A having some issues?
Apologies if this has been asked. I was browsing Q&A and got a Ruby error page, reloaded and everything was fine. However a bunch of the topics are kind of messed up, and it looks like a chunk of them are missing now. For example my 'questions I've answered' section of My Q&A only has the newest question and the oldest question, and when I sort the SEOMoz Tools category by newest I get one recent post and then the next one is from November of last year. You guys having database problems?
Moz Pro | | icecarats0