URL Errors Help - 350K Page Not Founds in 22 days

[usnseomoz]

Got a good one for you all this time...

For our site, Google Search Console is reporting 436,758 "Page Not Found" errors within the Crawl Error report.

This is an increase of 350,000 errors in just 22 days (on Sept 21 we had 87,000 errors which was essentially consistently at that number for the previous 4 months or more). Then on August 22nd the errors jumped to 140,000, then climbed steadily from the 26th until the 31st reaching 326,000 errors, and then climbed again slowly from Sept 2nd until today's 436K.

Unfortunately I can only see the top 1,000 erroneous URLs in the console, of which they seem to be custom Google tracking URLs my team uses to track our pages.

A few questions:

1. Is there anyway to see the full list of 400K URLs Google is reporting they cannot find?
2. Should we be concerned at all about these? 
3. Any other advice?

thanks in advance!

C

[TimHolmes]

Hi Usnseomoz,

1. Maybe perform a deeper search via a bit of kit like ScreamingFrog. This should help to further highlight any missing pages / errors etc

2. I would always be concerned with any problem until you have either been able to resolve it or discount it. Sounds like it could be the URL tracking parameters which are causing you some issues, especially if you are tracking users for multiple sources / sales affiliates. If they are solely used for tracking and no other purpose I would consider adding these parameter vairables to the crawl filters.

Side menu >> Crawl >> Url Parameters
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6080548?rd=1

Hope this is of some use

Cheers

Tim

[ViviCa1]

Not sure if this is related but myself and someone else have seen something similar around the same time happen, see here: https://moz.com/community/q/strange-increase-of-pages-not-found-gwt

[David-Kley]

I'm guessing this is for a news or ecommerce site? That is a lot of URLs.

Screaming Frog is a good resource, but I would look at the format of the URLs and how your platform creates URLs. I remember years ago many people were having issues with Wordpress, Joomla and other CMS's creating alternate URLs without the publisher knowing about them. Most likely its a setting in your system. Take a look at the URL settings and also the URLs that the tracking software is stating that it cannot find. Look for patterns across URLs and categories. You may find what you are looking for.

[usnseomoz]

thank you all for the feedback. A comprehensive deep crawl is being conducted on the site now to help find out more. I truly appreciate all your guidance.

best

CC

[David-Kley]

No problem! Please let us know if you need any help once you have your results.