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- for the past few years we have been leaving the pages on the site, creating a big amount of outdated url's without either content nor traffic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
-
Does MOZ Provide an On Page Grader Embed?
I am looking to provide an on page grader on our website. Does MOZ provide this feature?
Moz Pro | | WebMarkets0 -
Domain authority get down significantly. Internal MOZ Issue? Google Algoritm Update?
I've noticed that several websites have lost DA since middle of october. I attached a picture. Could be this a MOZ internal issue like happened a time ago? Not only the DA get down, I have lost C-blocks links, too
Moz Pro | | NachoRetta
I check in http://health.moz.com/ and found this Crawl Services Outage: http://health.moz.com/incidents/fbn00m7xxzx2
But not appear to have direct relation with my question.
Or may be a google algoritm update? 3anVE5J.png2 -
Perplexed - Errors increasing, moz rank dropping, conflicting data from other sources. Please Help.
Hi there, I'm in a bit of a bind and could seriously do with some help. For the past month I've been working with a client to resolve errors onsite. In that period my moz rank has plummeted and my errors (dupe title & content) have increased dramatically. The correlation makes sense, the increase - not so much. Here's why, screaming frog is reporting that the majority of duplicate titles have been removed or dealt with. I've also got the assurance of the developer that the suggested changes are being implemented. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with the CMS - umbraco - and this is the first time I'm working with this particular developer, so I'm not sure how to gauge progress without using moz tools. So, here are my immediate questions: 1. Why would I get different results from Screaming Frog and Rogerbot? 2. Has anyone here been in a similar situation and could they recommend areas to watch for errors creeping in? 3. Is there a way of identifying which errors have occurred when? Narrowing it down to the week each error occurred would be good enough. 4. Is anybody aware of any inherent SEO flaws in umbraco or common SEO mistakes made using the CMS? 5. is there anything I could provide you with to help you help me? 6. Do you have a suggestion? I'm pretty stuck. Thanks in advance.
Moz Pro | | KJDMedia0 -
Oh my gosh a gender change
When I wasn't looking, I became a "Journeyman". Hooray for me, but I kinda liked being female. ;o) Is there such a thing as a Journeywoman? (couldn't resist- please excuse me if anyone objects to completely inappropriate "questions")
Moz Pro | | gfiedel5 -
Sub-accounts on Moz
Can you create sub-user accounts on Moz?... Ones which provide limited access to certain users like use of the tools or access to view rankings in a campaign without being able to edit anything??
Moz Pro | | Qology1 -
Find 404 errors
Seomoz is currently reporting 404-errors, without saying where these errors are found. What good is this report when it does'nt say a word about where I can find the page linking to the 404? Screen: http://filer.crenia.no/NJPZ I really think it's time for Seomoz to prioritize upgrading the pro tools. Feels like they haven't been updated in ages..
Moz Pro | | Inevo1 -
Lots of site errors after last crawl....
Something interesting happened on the last update for my site on SEOmoz pro tools. For the last month or so the errors on my site were very low, then on the last update I had a huge spike in errors, warnings, and notices. I'm not sure if somehow I made a change to my site (without knowing it) and I caused all of these errors, or if it just took a few months to find all the errors on my site? My duplicate page content went from 0 to 45, my duplicate page titles went from 0 to 105, my 4xx (client error) went from 0 to 4, and my title missing or empty went from 0 to 3. On the warnings sections my missing meta description tag went form a hand full to 444. (most of these looking to be archive pages.) Down in the notices I have over 2000 that are blocked by meta robots, meta-robots nofollow, and Rel canonical. I didn't have any where near this many prior to the last update of my site. I just wanted to see what I need to do to clean this up, and figure out if I did something to cause all the errors. I'm assuming the red errors are the first things I need to clean up. Any help you guys can provide would be greatly appreciated. Also if you'd like me to post any additional information, please let me know and I'd be glad to.
Moz Pro | | NoahsDad0 -
Change campaign domain name
I have just changed the domain name on one of my sites, can i change the domain name of the reletive campaigns and keep the data, or do i have to set up a new campaigns?
Moz Pro | | AlanMosley0