Too many broken links which i am unable to understand
-
Dear All,
There are some links which are cropping up again and again in my google webmaster tools. I am using wordpress and genesis theme. Both are upgraded to the latest version. But there are 3 types of errors being created as mentioned below.
tag/target-markets/%E2%80%9Dhttp:/www.wordpress.org%E2%80%9D
tag/smartphone-apps/%E2%80%9Dhttp:/%E2%80%9Dhttp:/www.marketing91.com%E2%80%9D
how-to-maintain-customer-interest/%3C?php%20the_permalink()%20?%3E
As you can see, either wordpress.orf or marketing91.com or php%20 the _permalink is being added at the end of URLs and they are breaking. This cannot be seen in google index. But this indicates wrong coding and due to it my traffic is regularly dropping. Can you tell me what is causing the break in URL like above.
My website is http://www.marketing91.com
Thanks in advance. This has being going on for 2 months
Hope someone comes out with the right answer.
-
These look like simple broken links, often caused by using relative paths incorrectly or forgetting to include http:// when linking to a website (e.g. which will then make the link look like this to a spider http://www.yourdopmain.com/www.someotherdomain.com.</p>
<p>In your case it looks like there are some HTML URL encoding issues too. <strong>%E2 %80 %9D</strong> is a string used to encode a right quotation mark, and <strong>%E2 %80 %9C</strong> is a string used to encode a left quotation mark.</p>
<p>I'm going to assume that your content management system is adding this code, possibly when content is being copied and pasted from another CMS, word processing software, website builder, etc...</p>
<p>You can fix it by replacing that code with a standard ASCII )which will then make the link look like this to a spider http://www.yourdopmain.com/www.someotherdomain.com.</p>
<p>In your case it looks like there are some HTML URL encoding issues too. <strong>%E2 %80 %9D</strong> is a string used to encode a right quotation mark, and <strong>%E2 %80 %9C</strong> is a string used to encode a left quotation mark.</p>
<p>I'm going to assume that your content management system is adding this code, possibly when content is being copied and pasted from another CMS, word processing software, website builder, etc...</p>
<p>You can fix it by replacing that code with a standard ASCII ) -
Adding so many 301's to these pages is a bit difficult because a) every week there are more and more of these pages. there are 50 such errors in a single day. and the same is repeated every week. b) too many 301s might also hamper my site and google might look at it negatively
BUT more importantly, DO YOU THINK that this is a reason for traffic drops? These links are not being indexed by google. Neither are they linked from anywhere. DO you think that these links are transient and may pass away with time?
your reply will be appreciated.
-
I just ran a spider on your site and saw no 404s from that crawl so there were no links on your site pointing to the URLs. Also, like you said, those URLs are not in the Google index. I checked your sitemap. You reference a zipped sitemap in your robots.txt http://www.marketing91.com/sitemap.xml.gz vs http://www.marketing91.com/sitemap.xml but not sure that this makes a difference.
You need to trace back to when you saw the errors showing up and see if you did anything to your site at the time. Did all of this show up when you updated themes or made some other change? It may be that you used to have these URLs on the old version of the site and when you made changes the pages went away and now Google is trying to change them. In that case, it may not be the 404 errors that are causing the problem, but something else when you updated.
It may be that you need to setup some "Catch all" 301 redirects so that when garbage gets added to the end of your URLs they 301 to the correct page. That would help clean this up, but not sure this is the reason you are losing traffic from Google.
Honestly, these are just guesses and so I hope that they may trigger something else for you to check.
Good luck.
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
-
How do you increase the page footprint, so more links appear on search result?
We want to have more website links to appear in SERP. How to do that?
On-Page Optimization | | WalterHalicki0 -
Long-tail with few searches vs. Generic with many
Our business is a contract packager/manufacturer of products sold to very prominent brands who sell through retail. For example, we make the sunscreen under a brand’s name, which you might then find on the shelf in Target or CVS. As I’ve optimized our pages, I’ve attempted to go long-tail, which has been simply to add “…contract packaging” or a variation after the particular product. So, instead of trying to compete in “sunscreen”, which would pit me against big-box distributors and prominent brands and sellers of sunscreen, I’ve optimized for “sunscreen manufacturers.” “Sunscreen” has 31K – 72K searches, with an 81 Difficulty and 67 Potential. “Sunscreen manufacturers” has a low 13 Difficulty and a decent 54 Potential, but only 51 – 100 searches. Some of my terms have only 0 – 10 searches, but I’ve been thinking that it’s better to compete for fewer but more qualified / buyer-intent searches and have generally lower Difficulty. Can you please tell me if this is a smart strategy, or if I should instead try to compete in higher-volume terms but much greater Difficulty? Thanks a lot for everyone's help.
On-Page Optimization | | Beau_W0 -
Understanding hreflang
Got a question regarding hreflang tag and specifically about the language part:
On-Page Optimization | | Kung_fu_Panda
If I have 2 parallel pages, one in German and one in English for UK users. for example: How does google see the “language” part: 1.Based on user language – Google will display this page in the SERP according to what google believe is the user’s language based on the user’s browsers language setting, search query language ect..? in this case the German speaking user in UK will get the DE version Or 2.The language setting in the hreflang tag just means the specified URL language
So Google will display the EN-GB version in UK both to the English & German user? If you jave any other ideas - i will be glad to hear:) Hope I’m clear enough. Thanks!0 -
Low quality links
I remember finding a tutorial on MOZ about how to remove low quality links. But i cant find it now. can someone help?
On-Page Optimization | | kevinbp0 -
On page links
Hi I am really intrigued by Bloomberg strategy. if you look at their article pages they are full with internal links done with what I assume to be an automated process (too many pages to be done manually). it seems to work for them. I would love to hear your opinions.
On-Page Optimization | | ciznerguy
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-26/uber-said-close-to-raising-funding-at-up-to-40b-value.html0 -
What is on page links?
Hi - i would like to know exactly what an on page link is? i understand the linking system however cant work what exactly what an on page link is? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | OasisLandDevelopment0 -
Should I nofollow all my outbound links?
I've read a lot of stuff and I can't get a good answer about this. Now I'm reading Wordpress 3 - Search Engine Optimization, and the writer says that less outbound dofollow links you have, better for you. What is the best practice in this subject? Should I really nofollow more than 80% of all my outbound links? Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | izaiasalmeida0 -
Links to Product pages
Hello all, I am still rather new to SEO and learning a lot every day. I do have a question. On our product search result pages (example http://shop.ferguson.com/search/bathroom-lighting)
On-Page Optimization | | Ferguson
It is currently set up so the image, text, price etc of a product is linking to that product page. Our question is, if we were to link the image and the product name - will this be seen as two links to the same page? Is this a bad thing having multiple links to the same page? I searched around to see how other ecommerce sites have similar pages setup and it seems they link the image and also the product name, and the description is not click-able, which allows a user to "Highlight" the text (this is not possible on ours) Which would be to correct approach for SEO as well as User Interface, the way we have it set up, or by going with the method of the question I asked, Thank you for any information on this! Nick0