GSC is reporting a lot of chopped URLs
-
Recently, in the last two weeks, I started seeing a lot of odd 404 errors in GSC for my site. Upon investigation, the URLs are for fairly new articles, and the URLs are chopped in various places. From missing a character at the end to missing about 10 characters at the end of the URL. (an old similar issue is that GSC reports duplicate contents on weird subdomains that we've never used like 'smtp' 'ww1' or even random ones like 'bobo'.)
GSC doesn't report any 'linked from' for those odd URLs and I know for sure these links aren't on the site itself. They're definitely not errors in the CMS.
The site is a long established site (started 1997-1998) and we've been subject to a lot of negative SEO. I recently had to disavow about 1000 .ru domain linking to us, with some domains containing over a million link each.
Could these chopped links be a new tactic of negative SEO? How do I find these seemingly intentionally broken links to us?
-
Thanks for the question. It isn't uncommon for there to be strange 404 errors in Search Console with little information/bad information. They are working hard to improve this, but I wouldn't take everything you see there as set-in-stone.
This doesn't sound like a negative SEO tactic. I would just mark them all as fixed, and see if they appear again in about a week. If they do, I'd make sure they are actually served as 4xx status and not worry too much about it. If you want to do more digging...
Some ideas of where you could look further
- Logs logs logs. This will be the ultimate truth - you will be able to see whether or not GoogleBot is actually hitting those URLs.
- It could be something weird happening with a plugin of yours that generates those URLs (particularly on Wordpress).
- Perhaps you have a filtering system setup that generates these URLs?
- If you have a search function on the site, sometimes weird URLs can be generated through that.
- Do the URLs come-up when you crawl the site at all?
Just a few ideas!
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
-
Index an URL without directly linking it?
Hi everyone, Here's a duplicate content challenge I'm facing: Let's assume that we sell brown, blue, white and black 'Nike Shoes model 2017'. Because of technical reasons, we really need four urls to properly show these variations on our website. We find substantial search volume on 'Nike Shoes model 2017', but none on any of the color variants. Would it be theoretically possible to show page A, B, C and D on the website and: Give each page a canonical to page X, which is the 'default' page that we want to rank in Google (a product page that has a color selector) but is not directly linked from the site Mention page X in the sitemap.xml. (And not A, B, C or D). So the 'clean' urls get indexed and the color variations do not? In other words: Is it possible to rank a page that is only discovered via sitemap and canonicals?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adriaan.Multiply0 -
Link juice through URL parameters
Hi guys, hope you had a fantastic bank holiday weekend. Quick question re URL parameters, I understand that links which pass through an affiliate URL parameter aren't taken into consideration when passing link juice through one site to another. However, when a link contains a tracking URL parameter (let's say gclid=), does link juice get passed through? We have a number of external links pointing to our main site, however, they are linking directly to a unique tracking parameter. I'm just curious to know about this. Thanks, Brett
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Worried about keyword stuffing penalty re: URLs
I've noticed a potential problem with a mult-location business (this is an example URL - not the actual name of the business) I sense this is OK: carsdepots.com/ashford/cars But then I noticed they've added cars to location part of URL in some instances (they have 6 locations in total and have done this with 5 of them): carsdepots.com/birmingham-cars/cars So we have cars in there 3 times (that's the maximum number of times in any URL but it looks a little spammy to me) I am tempted to remove yoga from the location names, or flatten the URL structure completely - your thoughts would be welcome, or perhaps I shouldn't even be worrying?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Urls missing from product_cat sitemap
I'm using Yoast SEO plugin to generate XML sitemaps on my e-commerce site (woocommerce). I recently changed the category structure and now only 25 of about 75 product categories are included. Is there a way to manually include urls or what is the best way to have them all indexed in the sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kisen0 -
How to deal with old, indexed hashbang URLs?
I inherited a site that used to be in Flash and used hashbang URLs (i.e. www.example.com/#!page-name-here). We're now off of Flash and have a "normal" URL structure that looks something like this: www.example.com/page-name-here Here's the problem: Google still has thousands of the old hashbang (#!) URLs in its index. These URLs still work because the web server doesn't actually read anything that comes after the hash. So, when the web server sees this URL www.example.com/#!page-name-here, it basically renders this page www.example.com/# while keeping the full URL structure intact (www.example.com/#!page-name-here). Hopefully, that makes sense. So, in Google you'll see this URL indexed (www.example.com/#!page-name-here), but if you click it you essentially are taken to our homepage content (even though the URL isn't exactly the canonical homepage URL...which s/b www.example.com/). My big fear here is a duplicate content penalty for our homepage. Essentially, I'm afraid that Google is seeing thousands of versions of our homepage. Even though the hashbang URLs are different, the content (ie. title, meta descrip, page content) is exactly the same for all of them. Obviously, this is a typical SEO no-no. And, I've recently seen the homepage drop like a rock for a search of our brand name which has ranked #1 for months. Now, admittedly we've made a bunch of changes during this whole site migration, but this #! URL problem just bothers me. I think it could be a major cause of our homepage tanking for brand queries. So, why not just 301 redirect all of the #! URLs? Well, the server won't accept traditional 301s for the #! URLs because the # seems to screw everything up (server doesn't acknowledge what comes after the #). I "think" our only option here is to try and add some 301 redirects via Javascript. Yeah, I know that spiders have a love/hate (well, mostly hate) relationship w/ Javascript, but I think that's our only resort.....unless, someone here has a better way? If you've dealt with hashbang URLs before, I'd LOVE to hear your advice on how to deal w/ this issue. Best, -G
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Celts180 -
Long URL with QueryStrings
Hi, I have a search page that generates some querystrings (with the term, current page, number of pages etc). This long url is something bad for Google indexing? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GDB0 -
What reports should I run, what else can i improve?
Hi, I ran a full Ranking analysis report for "empresa diseño web" for Google Mexico. From what I could see, my site has better metrics in most items than many of the top 10 sites for those keywords. What other reports should I run in order to gain some insights on how to improve on my site and improve my position? Thanks and regards, Rosario
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | prointernacional0 -
Redirecting my new Website URL to my old Website URL
Hi! OK, I am semi - new to SEO Moz but have been self-teaching for 3 years. However I am stuck.. I have been operating my e-commerce site from www.shopadornonline.com for the past 3 years. I just purchased www.shopadorn.com Right now Shopadorn.com re-directs to www.shopadornonline.com because all my products and links go to shopadornonline.com/productblahblahblah I guess I am stuck. Not sure what to tell my web designer to do? Do I give up on having shopadorn.com OR do I start re-directing customers and doing 301 re-directs? I think from what i have read that it is bad to have traffic going to both shopadorn and shopadornonline as they compete for rankings? Where should I start?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shopadorn0