Help with Webmaster Tools "Not Followed" Errors
-
I have been doing a bunch of 301 redirects on my site to address 404 pages and in each case I check the redirect to make sure it works. I have also been using tools like Xenu to make sure that I'm not linking to 404 or 301 content from my site. However on Friday I started getting "Not Followed" errors in GWT. When I check the URL that they tell me provided the error it seems to redirect correctly. One example is this...
http://www.mybinding.com/.sc/ms/dd/ee/48738/Astrobrights-Pulsar-Pink-10-x-13-65lb-Cover-50pk
I tried a redirect tracer and it reports the redirect correctly. Fetch as googlebot returns the correct page. Fetch as bing bot in the new bing webmaster tools shows that it redirects to the correct page but there is a small note that says "Status: Redirection limit reached". I see this on all of the redirects that I check in the bing webmaster portal.
Do I have something misconfigured. Can anyone give me a hint on how to troubleshoot this type of issue.
Thanks,
Jeff
-
Hey Jeff,
Were you able to fix this and get the "Status: Redirection limit reached." Bing message to go away?
Any idea what that message means, is Bing seeing daisy chained 301s on that URL or is it just too many sitewide 301's being hit by the crawler and Bing thinks you are wasting their time?
-
then you are on the right track, i asked because many seem to think that they must redirect 404s simply because they are found in WMT.
-
It was a tough decision on what to do with the 404's on the site. I just made a major configuration change to the server that converted a bunch of soft 404's over to hard ones. This caused WMT to find thousands of 404 pages on the site in a matter of days. My site doesn't link to any of these pages but most of them have external links pointing to them.
In the end I decided to redirect discontinued products to the most appropriate category page on the site and to redirect mistyped URL's etc. to the appropriate page as well.
-
Yes the 301 works ok, but may I ask why you are 301'ing the 404s, do they have external links? if not just let them fade away. 404's simple mean the page has gone, and search engines will hounor that ater a while
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
-
Google Webmaster Tools is saying "Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt" after Https move...
Hi Everyone, I really don't see anything wrong with our robots.txt file after our https move that just happened, but Google says all URLs are blocked. The only change I know we need to make is changing the sitemap url to https. Anything you all see wrong with this robots.txt file? robots.txt This file is to prevent the crawling and indexing of certain parts of your site by web crawlers and spiders run by sites like Yahoo! and Google. By telling these "robots" where not to go on your site, you save bandwidth and server resources. This file will be ignored unless it is at the root of your host: Used: http://example.com/robots.txt Ignored: http://example.com/site/robots.txt For more information about the robots.txt standard, see: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html For syntax checking, see: http://www.sxw.org.uk/computing/robots/check.html Website Sitemap Sitemap: http://www.bestpricenutrition.com/sitemap.xml Crawlers Setup User-agent: * Allowable Index Allow: /*?p=
Technical SEO | | vetofunk
Allow: /index.php/blog/
Allow: /catalog/seo_sitemap/category/ Directories Disallow: /404/
Disallow: /app/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /downloader/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /lib/
Disallow: /magento/
Disallow: /pkginfo/
Disallow: /report/
Disallow: /stats/
Disallow: /var/ Paths (clean URLs) Disallow: /index.php/
Disallow: /catalog/product_compare/
Disallow: /catalog/category/view/
Disallow: /catalog/product/view/
Disallow: /catalogsearch/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /control/
Disallow: /contacts/
Disallow: /customer/
Disallow: /customize/
Disallow: /newsletter/
Disallow: /poll/
Disallow: /review/
Disallow: /sendfriend/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /wishlist/
Disallow: /aitmanufacturers/index/view/
Disallow: /blog/tag/
Disallow: /advancedreviews/abuse/reportajax/
Disallow: /advancedreviews/ajaxproduct/
Disallow: /advancedreviews/proscons/checkbyproscons/
Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/
Disallow: /productquestions/index/ajaxform/ Files Disallow: /cron.php
Disallow: /cron.sh
Disallow: /error_log
Disallow: /install.php
Disallow: /LICENSE.html
Disallow: /LICENSE.txt
Disallow: /LICENSE_AFL.txt
Disallow: /STATUS.txt Paths (no clean URLs) Disallow: /.php$
Disallow: /?SID=
disallow: /?cat=
disallow: /?price=
disallow: /?flavor=
disallow: /?dir=
disallow: /?mode=
disallow: /?list=
disallow: /?limit=5
disallow: /?limit=10
disallow: /?limit=15
disallow: /?limit=20
disallow: /*?limit=250 -
What do I need to do for HTTPS switch in Webmaster Tools?
My site is currently verified using a meta tag for both Google and Bing. Will I need to recreate the meta tag or will I be able to use the same one?
Technical SEO | | EcommerceSite1 -
Is a Rel="cacnonical" page bad for a google xml sitemap
Back in March 2011 this conversation happened. Rand: You don't want rel=canonicals. Duane: Only end state URL. That's the only thing I want in a sitemap.xml. We have a very tight threshold on how clean your sitemap needs to be. When people are learning about how to build sitemaps, it's really critical that they understand that this isn't something that you do once and forget about. This is an ongoing maintenance item, and it has a big impact on how Bing views your website. What we want is end state URLs and we want hyper-clean. We want only a couple of percentage points of error. Is this the same with Google?
Technical SEO | | DoRM0 -
Spurious malware warning in Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT)?
Hi, A client had a message in BWT: 'Bing Webmaster Tools detected 1 pages infected with malware on ...' The message was last updated 30/July but having checked the page and included javascript there's nothing that we can see which could be construed as malware. GWT seems happy enough with it and I've tried a couple of online site scanners (e.g. sucuri) and they seem happy enough. I'm minded to ignore it, but has anyone else had a similar experience? Thanks
Technical SEO | | JaspalX0 -
Rel="external"
Hi all, I got a link and its off a site and marked up with rel="external". Is this a followed or nofollowed link? Does it pass link juice? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Sharer0 -
How "Optimised" is my home page content
Good afternoon from 1 degrees C overcast frozen wetherby UK... I've made a number of on page html markup changes to optimise the page for steel suppliers steel stockholders but I'd like to know if there are any other on page improvments I could make for this page http://www.barrettsteel.com/ Im particulary concerned that contnet in in li tags and not p, could this be an issue? And finaaly on the home page a third party developer has slapped a header banner pointing to an external site know as woodberry tools, that cant be good can it? Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Hyphenated Domain Names - "Spammy" or Not?
Some say hyphenated domain names are "spammy". I have also noticed that Moz's On Page Keyword Tool does NOT recognize keywords in a non-hyphenated domain name. So one would assume neither do the bots. I noticed obviously misleading words like car in carnival or spa in space or spatula, etc embedded in domain names and pondered the effect. I took it a step further with non-hyphenated domain names. I experimented by selecting totally random three or four letter blocks - Example: randomfactgenerator.net - rand omf act gene rator Each one of those clips returns copious results AND the On-Page Report Card does not credit the domain name as containing "random facts" as keywords**,** whereas www.business-sales-sarasota.com does get credit for "business sales sarasota" in the URL. This seems an obvious situation - unhyphenated domains can scramble the keywords and confuse the bots, as they search all possible combinations. YES - I know the content should carry it but - I do not believe domain names are irrelevant, as many say. I don't believe that hyphenated domain names are not more efficient than non hyphenated ones - as long as you don't overdo it. I have also seen where a weak site in an easy market will quickly top the list because the hyphenated domain name matches the search term - I have done it (in my pre Seo Moz days) with ft-myers-auto-air.com. I built the site in a couple of days and in a couple weeks it was on page one. Any thoughts on this?
Technical SEO | | dcmike0 -
Rel="canonical" for PFDs?
Hello there, We have a lot of PDFs that seem to end up on other websites. I was wondering if there was a way to make sure that our website gets the credit/authority as the original creator. Besides linking directly from the PDF copy to our pages, is anyone aware of strategy for letting Google know that we are the original publishers? I know search engines can index HTML versions of PDFs, so is there anyway to get them to index a rel="canonical" tag as well? Thoughts/Ideas?
Technical SEO | | Tektronix0