Repeated mysterious 404's from ancient site structure killing my rankings
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Several years ago I changed my site structure to go from a flash based site to a blog based wordpress site. After doing so I went from page 1 to page 30 for my relevant search terms. I have employed people to help me track down the problem and I believe that they have narroed it to the existance of 404's being created from some unknown internal source. I have been for years getting links like this...
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......regularly showing in webmaster tools, (this is from a top pages report from MOZ where there are hundreds also shown).
When I do a moz crawl of the site, none of these links show up. Therefore I have no way of finding the source of these links (they also do not show me the source in WMT as they should).
We have completely cleared the site and rebuilt it and although it is still only a couple of weeks in it still does not appear to have stopped them.
Does anyone have any way of helping me find the source of these mysterious 404's?
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I edited the post so the URLs didn't run together. Still not perfect, but a little easier to read.
I'm not exactly sure where those links are coming from. You might run a tool like Xenu Link Sleuth or Screaming Frog on your site to see if there is an internal linking widget gone awry. The other thought I have is to look at Open Site Explorer to see what sites are linking to you and if they're linking to any of those pages.
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In Webmaster Tools, when you click on the 404 and the popup window appears, what is showing in the Linked from tab?
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Thanks for your response Keri,
Being staff can you please tell me where does the top pages data come from? Is it from crawling my site (like a google spider) or is it sourced from google or somewhere else. How often is that data refreshed?
In answer to your response, I have tried both screaming frog and xenu and my nice clean site structure is all it picks up. None of the ancient messy site structure appears.
Have been through the list of domains looking for an old sitemap or something similar that may have been scraped off my site but after a long and arduous task could not locate any reference to any of these links that show up in top pages and webmaster tools (which says they are linked from other ancient pages - which I will expand on below)
We have looked at all the usual suspects - old sitemaps, plugins and rebuilt the site just in case we missed anything that was lingering around. I have had really good people looking at it who continue to do so it just never seems to go away.
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Thanks for your reply EEE3
The ancient link says it is linked from another non existent ancient page that no longer exists and it is always first crawled and last detected on the day that it arrives.
eg. last crawled 4/23/14, first detected 4/23/14
http://www.dfphotographer.com.au/brisbaneweddingphotographer/2011/03/st-kilda-wedding......
linked from
http://dfphotographer.com.au/brisbaneweddingphotographer/index.php/2011/03/st-kilda-wedding.....
and
http://dfphotographer.com.au/brisbaneweddingphotographer/2011/03/st-kilda-wedding....
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Why bother trying to clean anything up? If somewhere out there there are links to your domain, and they're 404'ing, just 301 them to new pages on your site! Capture that link juice, don't let it run out
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