Why is my Crawl Report Showing Thousands of Pages that Do Not Exist?

[JennaCMag]

Hi,

I just downloaded a Crawl Summary Report for a client's website. I am seeing THOUSANDS of duplicate page content errors. The overwhelming majority of them look something like this:

ERROR: http://www.earlyinterventionsupport.com/resources/parentingtips/development/parentingtips/development/development/development/development/development/development/parentingtips/specialneeds/default.aspx

This page doesn't exist and results in a 404 page. Why are these pages showing up? How do I get rid of them? Are they endangering the health of my site as a whole?

Thank you,

Jenna

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[StreamlineMetrics]

It looks like the crawler is being caught in an endless loop, most likely a result of using relative URLs somewhere on your site. Yes, this is a problem for the site as a whole so I highly recommend implementing absolute URLs throughout the entire site.

Edit - I just looked at your site and this is exactly what it is. The links in your navigation are relative, such as "<a <="" span="">href="</a>../development/default.aspx"" so just change it to absolute URLs such as http://www.yoursite.com/development/default.aspx and it should fix the problem.

[JennaCMag]

Hi Streamline -

Thanks for your help thus far. Could you elaborate on some of the SEO challenges this presents? After a bit of research, I'm seeing people say that having hundreds or thousands of 404s are okay, if they are in fact non-existant pages. I'm not that well educated on this, so just looking for a bit of clarification.

I will look into the relative URL issue. I just recently took over the work on this site, and I'm still digging in to what the original web developer created.

Jenna

[StreamlineMetrics]

Hi Jenna,

It's not so much the fact you have 404 pages that is the problem for SEO, but rather the fact your site is creating a problem for the search engines to crawl the site correctly and efficiently since they are getting caught in an endless loop. This can be a problem because the crawlers may get caught in the endless loop and just give up on your site and leave, which means the search engines may not be able to access the rest of the pages on your site and may have a negative impact on your rankings as a whole. One of the most important parts of SEO is to make your website as "friendly" to the search engines as possible so if they caught in endless loops then that is definitely not ideal. Hope that helps!

Patrick