Pages with Temporary Redirects on pages that don't exist!

[Raptor-crew]

Hi There

Another obvious question to some I hope.

I ran my first report using the Moz crawler and I have a bunch of pages with temporary redirects as a medium level issue showing up. Trouble is the pages don't exist so they are being redirected to my custom 404 page.

So for example I have a URL in the report being called up from lord only knows where!:

www.domain.com/pdf/home.aspx

This doesn't exist, I have only 1 home.aspx page and it's in the root directory! but it is giving a temp redirect to my 404 page as I would expect but that then leads to a MOZ error as outlined.  So basically you could randomize any url up and it would give this error so I am trying to work out how I deal with it before Google starts to notice or before a competitor starts to throw all kinds at my site generating these errors.

Any steering on this would be much appreciated!

[renehansen]

Are you using a CMS? Often some archive files or sitemap, could generate traffic to pages which doesn't exist. How about a search function? Do you have any type of domain.com/s=?something that is being linked to?

[CleverPhD]

I have a URL in the report being called up from lord only knows where!:

Well, the good Lord does know where those pages are linked to due to the whole omnipotent thing He has going on, but if the Moz bot found those pages then that means that the bot knows and you can too!  If Moz bot found the links, then somewhere, someplace on your site, there are links to those pages.  Somewhere in your CMS or due to a typo, those links are being generated on your website.

If you download the CSV within the Moz crawl report section, you can look in the column that shows what pages link to those pages that do not exist anymore and have the temp 302 redirect url.  You can then go to those pages that link to the 302s and update them to correct the 302 redirect links.   I would do this ASAP on those 302 redirects.   You can also use other spider tools such as Screaming Frog, or Botify or Site Condor (there are a bunch out there) to find links like this.

One other suggestion, I assume if you have a temporary redirect, you are seeing a 302 (temporary) vs a 301 (permanent) redirect.  If you can, setup your server to use a 404 (page not found) vs the 302 (temporary redirect) when a page does not exist.  IMHO, 302s are from Satan himself and I have seen them wreak havoc on how Google indexed one of my sites when I used them.  At least with the 404 you get the right signal to Google and then when the crawler finds them, you do not have to be as worried about them.

Good luck and keep the faith!

[Raptor-crew]

Hi Guys

TY for the help, however the website is a raw and simple IIS one.  I have root access to the server and we manually upload and update all the sites we run, nothing fancy.  There's no CMS, just good old .aspx pages, images and a few folders.  The website is pretty static.

So here's some info from 1 entry in the CSV file of the report: (Replaced domain just to keep it private)

URL: http://domain.com/casestudies/home.aspx

HTTP Code: 302

Redirect URL: /Error404.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/casestudies/home.aspx

Referrer:

http://domain.com/casestudies/Home.aspx

I have double checked there are no accidental pages at these locations.

I have been setting up some rewrite/redirect rules, but these are allthe noemal trainling slah, www to root, removal of .aspx and some specific page redirects fro the old site but thats it.

I guess I need to know where the heck these could be coming from?

Dave

[CleverPhD]

I guess I need to know where the heck these could be coming from?

There is a town of Heck in the UK, but the links are probably not from there.  Sorry, I digress.

I would need to look at the CSV, as I think you might be seeing part of a loop in your example above as if I am reading it correctly you have a page linking to itself that redirects to another page.

PM me your website URL and send the CSV.

[Raptor-crew]

Hi There

Sorry for the delay, stag do at the weekend and Windows update trashed my PC today!!

So I will PM you with the spreadsheet, massive appreciation for taking a look.

[Raptor-crew]

Hi There, I sent you a PM last week but no cigar so far!

I can't see a way to send you an attached file, I am guessing I am waiting for an email for you?

Dave

[Raptor-crew]

Hi Guys, OK so we resolved this and it's a Microsoft issue!!  and a schoolboy mistake from me!

We use "Web User Controls" on the website that allow us to write re-usable modules for things like headers, burger menus and footers in an ASP.NET web solution.  We then drag and drop the onto any page and if we need to change them then we just change the core web user control HTML.

The rogue links were coming from these web user controls, when they were on pages in the rogue directories.

Now the reason we had this fault on this website on not on any other was because we made the mistake of using standard HTML

Well if the page is in the root directory then no problem.  If you want to go to the home.aspx page then the link is fine (HOME

However if you put this footer on  page in a sub folder then you need to change the link to ../home.aspx, but you can;t do that or all the pages in the root folder go squeewy.  So this is why you use an ASP:Hyperlink control instead, this allows you to define a page from root with the ~/home.aspx link.

This is where all of these rogue pages were coming form.

TY for the help guys.