Recent Webmaster Tools Glitch Impacting Site Quality?
-
The ramifications of this would not be specific to myself but to anyone with this type of content on their pages...
Maybe someone can chime in here, but I'm not sure how much if at all site errors (for example 404 errors) as reported by Google Webmaster Tools are seen as a factor in site quality, which would impact SEO rankings. Any insight on that alone would be appreciated.
I've noticed some fairly new weird stuff going on in the WMT 404 error reports. It seems as though their engine is finding objects within the source code of the page that are NOT links but look a URL, then trying to crawl them and reporting them as broken.
I've seen a couple different of cases in my environment that seem to trigger this issue.
The easiest one to explain are Google Analytic virtual pageview Javascript calls where for example you might send a virtual pageview back to GA for clicks on outbound links. So in the source code of your page you would have something like:
onclick="<a class="attribute-value">_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/outboundclick/www.othersite.com']);</a>
Although this is obviously not a crawl-able link, sure enough Webmaster Tools now would be reporting the following broken page with a 404:
www.mysite.com/outboundclick/www.otherwite.com
I've seen other such cases of thing that look like URLs but not actual links being pulled out of the page source and reported as broken links. Has anyone else noticed this? Do 404 instances (in this case false ones) reported by Webmaster Tools impact site quality rankings and SEO?
Interesting issue here, I'm looking forward to hear some people's thoughts on this.
Chris
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
-
Getting error in webmasters
My site was running perfectly from last one year... I don't know what happened now google is showing error while I am trying to use fetch option in webmasters. http://prntscr.com/6mtud5
Technical SEO | | Srinu0 -
How do I get my pages to go from "Submitted" to "Indexed" in Google Webmaster Tools?
Background: I recently launched a new site and it's performing much better than the old site in terms of bounce rate, page view, pages per session, session duration, and conversions. As suspected, sessions, users, and % new sessions are all down. Which I'm okay with because the the old site had a lot of low quality traffic going to it. The traffic we have now is much more engaged and targeted. Lastly, the site was built using Squarespace and was launched the middle of August. **Question: **When reviewing Google Webmaster Tools' Sitemaps section, I noticed it says 57 web pages Submitted, but only 5 Indexed! The sitemap that's submitted seems to be all there. I'm not sure if this is a Squarespace thing or what. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | Nate_D0 -
Mobile site not ranking
Hello, I have a m.site.com version of my original site. It is about 1/10 the size, and no matter what I do-I can't get the site to rank. I've added more pages and specified canonical etc etc. Should I add as many pages as my larger site has? Are there specific places I should be submitting this version beyond the typical? I am at a loss, so any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks! L
Technical SEO | | lfrazer1 -
How is this site doing this?
http://www.meccabingo.com It shows a splash / promotion page yet you check the cache and it's the real homepage, they are doing this so they don't lose rankings but how are they redirecting users to that but Google is caching the real homepage? is it friendly? thanks!!
Technical SEO | | AdiRste0 -
Young site trying hard, but banging head against the wall -- Site Review
Hi All New to PRO but we're seriously committed to getting this working. And firstly thank you to anyone who offers any useful thoughts and insights. We've launched a new site, unfortunately late to the market for the season and are really struggling to get search engine recognition. Site: http://www.ignitehats.co.uk/ We're continuously adding new content, slowly gathering more links and working hard to promote socially. But even on our clearest search terms like "Ignite hats" we're down on page 4. Both GWT and the Seomoz tools highlight no big problems (a few titles that are too long) but otherwise nothing. Maybe wrongly we requested that the Google spam team review our site incase it was being penalised, but got a template response saying the site was not in their spam system (phew, there wasn't a reason it should be we believe). We're wondering if this is just that our site is just too young? It's been live for 6 weeks. But worry maybe this is not the case. We've had success with another site we run much sooner than this. Any help or pointers would be really appreciated. Similar stories and what others have done, at least to give us some confidence to carry on would be great. Thanks for reading.
Technical SEO | | JHill0 -
Should I create mini-sites with keyword rich domain names pointing to my main site?
Hi, I'm new to seomoz (and seo in general) and loving it so far. My main domain name is more of a brandname than a search engine friendly list of keywords. I rank well for some keywords I optimized for, and less so for the more competitive keywords. I was wondering if making one page minisites hosted on keyword rich domain names could help in this respect? What I want to do is just have a single page with a few paragraphs of content and links to the main site. I am not looking for links to boost the main site, just for the minisites to do better for several keywords. Will this help? Is this ok, or against some Google policy? Can this hurt the main site rankings? Thank you! **Edit: **I noticed that sites ranking above me on the first page for some keywords have much less on-page elements than my page, have about the same domain trust and also very little inbound links. The only factor I can see is the exact match of keywords in the domain name.
Technical SEO | | Eladla1 -
Site Relaunch
Hello, I recently launched my new site (Nov. 25, 2011) but still have the old site live because I still need old customer data from the old admin for customer service issues and I cannot delete the old front-end without deleting the old back-end!. I am seeing a lot of referrals coming from the old site IP address with many backlinks to the new site but dont know if this is actually hurting the new site due to duplicate content, ect .. Any input would be greatly aaaaaapreciated 😉 Thanks in advance, Byron-
Technical SEO | | k9byron0