404 issues

[rikomuttik]

Hello,

Some time ago, something like a month and a half) I have removed all 404 errors from the google index and the webmaster tools have removed them already, however yesterday moz found the same 404 errors that i have removed from indexing (tose pages are deleted or redirected by the site developer).

What could be an issue here and why webmaster tools are not registering those 404 errors but moz analytics does.

And the other question is if those pages do not exist can i track where the placed? I tried dowloading moz crawl test, but the refering source was not provided.

I would highly appreciate anyones help.

Thank you

[LesleyPaone]

I really think that Moz lacks in this area. For finding things like this I use Raven Tools, they have a really good crawler. It clearly shows all of the pages that reference an error. My thoughts would be that either you missed some links to the pages or the redirects are not working properly, I would suspect that if Moz finds them, Google or Bing will find them.

[customerparadigm.com]

Rikomuttik-

There are a couple of reasons why 404 errors might be showing up again, even if you've fixed them in Google.

1. Moz might be using an older crawl that still lists pages that don't exist on the site.

2. If you're using a soft 404 error handling (i.e. all 404 errors redirect to the home page), then Google might not see the errors, but perhaps Moz does?

3. It's possible that you have inbound links from other sites that point to your site, that is throwing 404 errors, and that's what it being seen by other search engines.

4. It's also possible that the 301 redirects you might have set up in your .htaccess file have been changed, or are no longer working?

5. It's also possible that an older page that used to be on the site, was removed, was added back in, and that page has links that go to 404 pages?

Hope this helps?

-- Jeff

[rikomuttik]

Hey Jeff,

Thank you for your answers.

I assume the issue might be within the point 3 from your suggestion list, is there something i could do find automatically this or perhaps just to go through all of the backlinks and somehow to find it old links like this?

Or there is nothing I can really do about it and just to ignore? Will it not hurst the website?

Thank you!

[customerparadigm.com]

Rikomuttik-

If you do, indeed, have inbound links from other sites pointing over to your site, this is a really good thing.  This often happens when people want to link to an article, image or other page within the site.

I'd do a crawl on Open Site Explorer, or within Google's Webmaster Tools, and see if you can find any inbound links that are pointing to non-existing pages, and your system is giving 404 errors.

Then, I'd use a 301 redirect to take the inbound link and direct it to the proper location.  Or, if you really want, you can re-create the page at the older location, but just make sure that you're not creating duplicate content on the site.

Hope this helps!

• Jeff

[DavidLee]

Hello!

I took a look at your sites and we last crawled them in July so we haven't discovered any new links to follow to your site to update our index. We will only store indexed data for up to 80 days unless re-crawled. Using Raven Tools and others is a better way to look at your full profile while OSE looks for fresh, diverse, and important links.

Hope this helps!