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Hi Mozers,

How come Moz reports just six 404 errors, whereas Google Search Console reports 250 and Screaming Frog only reports a dozen? It seems to me that these results are all over the place. Shouldn't these reports be more consistent?

I do understand that Search Console includes historical data and that URLs or issues need to be "marked as fixed" in order for them to go away, however, even if I do this, Google ends up reporting far more errors than anything else.

Do 404s reported by Moz and Screaming Frog NOT include external links? It seems to me that this could be partially responsible for the issue.

Also, is there a way to efficiently track the source of the 404s besides clicking on "Linked From" within Search Console 250 times? I was looking for something like this is Moz or SF but no luck.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanksabunch!

Hi Chris,

To follow-up on an old post of yours, I'm faced with hundreds of random WordPress tags that our social media person created during the past couple of years. Most of these serve no purpose and do not support a consistent site-wide theme. In my opinion, these just seem to dilute keyword emphasis and make it difficult for Google to know what our site is actually about.

I am seeing dozens of our /tag/ pages in the search results so I know they've been indexed. Last week I blocked the tags from Google using the no index feature within the Yoast plugin for WordPress, however, I'm reluctant to go in and just delete a bunch of tags for fear of generating hundreds of 404 error pages.

Any words of wisdom are appreciated.

Thanks.

Eric

Hi Linda,

Thanks for your input. Much appreciate it. Can you show me a page or two where you see those links located? I actually searched the page source for variations of APB, speakers bureau, etc. and saw nothing. Perhaps I wasn't looking in the right place.

Thanks again for your help.

Eric

Hi Jake,

Thanks for taking the time to dig into this and provide me with some advice. You bring up some good points that are well taken.

I will speak with the client about this and reach out to you at Angular if we need a hand.

Thanks again.

Eric

Hello big-brained Moz folks,

We recently used Open Site Explorer to compile a list of inbound linking domains to one of our clients, alongside domains linking to a major competitor.

This competitor, APBSpeakers.com, is dominating the search results with many #1 rankings for highly competitive phrases, even though their onsite SEO is downright weak. This competitor also has exponentially more links(602k vs. 2.4k) and way more content(indexed pages) reported than any of their competitors, which seems physically impossible to me. Linking root domains are shown as 667 compared to 170 for our client, who has been in business for 10+ years.

Taking matters a step further, linking domains for this competitor include such authoritative domains as:

• Cnn.com
• TheGuardian.com
• PBS.org
• HuffingtonPost.com
• LATimes.com
• Time.com
• CBSNews.com
• NBCNews.com
• Princeton.edu
• People.com

Sure, I can see getting a few high profile linking domains but the above seems HIGHLY suspicious to me.

Upon further review, I searched CNN, The Guardian and PBS for all variations of this competitors name and domain name and found no immediate mentions of their name. I smell a rat and I suspect APB is using some sort behind-the-scenes programming to make these "links" happen, but I have no idea how. If this isn't the case, they must have a dedicated PR person with EXTREMELY strong connections to secure this links, but even this seems like a stretch.

It's conceivable that APB is posting comments on all of the above sites, along with links, however, I was under the impression that all such posts were NoFollow and carried no link juice. Also, paid advertisements on the above sites should be NoFollow as well, right?

Anyway, we're trying to get to the bottom of this issue and determine what's going on. If you have any thoughts or words of wisdom to help us compete with these seemingly Black Hat SEO tactics, I'd sure love to hear from you.

Thanks for your help. I appreciate it very much.

Eric

Hello Blue,

Thanks for your input several days ago. I apologize for the delay in getting back to you. I was on vacation.

Anyway, I appreciate your words of wisdom. I have been digging into the Open Site Explorer but I am far from an expert at this point. That said, I shall continue to persevere.

Thanks again.

Eric

Hi Andy,

Thanks for your input. Much appreciated. I apologize for the delay in responding. I was on vacation with my family and just returned.

Thanks again.

Eric

Hello Moz folks,

We have a SEO client who has exponentially fewer equity-passing links(inbound and internal) than their two major competitors, which I'm sure is a MAJOR factor in their rankings. In fact, the numbers are so drastically different seems to indicate that these competitors are participating in some sort of black hat link farm. For example:

Internal and Inbound Equity-Passing Links

• Our client - 2274
• Competitor 1 - 496k
• Competitor 2 - 143k

How is this possible or legit? I don't understand.

Our well-known client has been in business for 10+ years and they have a content-rich, WordPress website consisting of thousands of pages that have been optimized for search, including keyword-rich URLs, page titles, metas, H1 tags, etc. The things that keep coming to mind are the need for more links and more content.

One thing that comes to mind is that the client launched a new site about 1.5 years ago and changed their domain prefix from http to https. I'm not sure if this would have an impact on inbound link equity or not. 301 redirects are in place so from what I understand, all of the old http pages should have passed at least partial domain equity to the new https site.

I'm also wondering if changing the structure of WordPress categories, tags and author pages could somehow dynamically increase the page count and amount of perceived content. We may be overly restrictive with Google Search Console.

Anyway, I'm at a loss and don't understand how our competitors, with seemingly similar content, could have exponentially more links and are dominating the search results.

Thanks for your help and sage advice. Your input is very much appreciated.

Eric

pSzXl

Two of our clients have experienced a huge dip in organic rankings during the past week or so and we haven't done anything that would cause this. Have there been any major Google changes reported lately? I'm not seeing anything reported here: https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change.

Thanks for your input.

Eric

Hi, I'm a noobie and I'm seeing the same thing. From what I understand we're supposed to be seeing weekly updates in the dashboard on a weekly basis. The last data I'm seeing is for the week of April 17th-23rd, which is over a week ago. Am I misunderstanding something? Help. Thanks.