Hi Moz community! Why are the number of high priority issues (404s) significantly different between MoZ and Google search console?

[rooify]

Hi Moz community! So when i ran a site crawl to analyze page issues for a site that has been in our account for some time now, it only showed 10 high priority (404) issues...yet when i logged into wordpress and installed yoast premium and connected to google search console, around 900 404s showed up....(we have not blocked off any pages to be crawled) does anyone know a reason why this happens?

[TimHolmes]

I would imagine it is due to the results being driven from two seperate indexes. Moz will be returning error results from its set and Google from theirs. There will also be differences due to the regularity of being recrawled and indexed.

[Lumina]

Tim's correct, but I'll add a couple of things:

• Never take any analytics platform as gospel - meaning, each of them have their inaccuracies. This is one of the benefits to having multiple platforms running analytics on your site(s).
• In this case, I would recommend following Google's count. Not only because it's higher, but because their analytics are going to be more accurate (generally) to what's happening in SERPs. When I say the volume of page issues is a factor, what I'm considering is that either Google is simply seeing more errors than Moz, or Google's crawl is itself in error (which happens on occasion). Either way, that would need to be resolved, so solving the issues Google's provided should be paramount.
• Lastly, the Yoast plugin is wonderful in many ways. Don't take everything it gives you at face value, but more often than not, it'll be a fantastic resource for on-page SEO. There's also a plugin simply called "Redirection" that can setup 301s from a page that's 404ed to a more relevant page, should you wish to go that path. Either way, always make sure you have either a dedicated 404 page (with actionable content so users aren't lost), or some manner of populate-able content.

Good luck!

[rooify]

Thank you for the helpful response Tim!

[rooify]

Thank you for responding and for the recommendations Bryan! definitely agree on the importance of having multiple platforms running analytics and yes, Google tends to be ahead of the game with SERPs.