Google Webmaster Tools - Pages Not Found

[RJO Salt Lake]

In Google Webmaster Tools, for my website, under the Crawl Errors category, I'm getting about 4,696 pages "Not Found". Any idea what's going here and do I need to worry about it? Thanks!

[Portland Real Estate]

It depends. It could mean that you have a lot of bad links, or that you've changed the name of pages, but with that many, it's more likely related to your IDX pages. MLS Listings expire, and so it could be just that. I think somewhere in the tools it will tell you what pages are not being found and that should give you the clues to figure out what's going on.

[RJO Salt Lake]

It does look like it is my IDX pages, but it looks like Google is trying to go to a linked page from my IDX details page, but the page link doesn't make sense. For example, from an IDX detail page, here is the page link google can't find:

http://www.dwellutah.com/idx/land/692316/%E2%80%93

I have no idea what the "/%E2%80%93" is.

Another example:

http://www.dwellutah.com/idx/land/692316/OgdenArea.php

I do have an OgdenArea.php page, but why is this text appended to the end of my link to an idx detail page?

I checked all 4000+ not found links that google is reporting and they all seem to be of these two types: either they have the "/%E2%80%93" ending appended, or they have a link to one of my other pages (such as OgdenArea.php) appended.

Any more ideas, REW?

[thataway61]

I had a broken snippet that did that once. Never figured out why. You need the redirect module and redirect the broken ones, but there is no wildcard for redirects like a " * ", so it will be some grueling work. Find the broken snippet and fix it and just let those bad ones that got indexed fade away.

[RJO Salt Lake]

Thanks, Cal. Aaron responded that at least part of the problem comes from not including a leading "/" in my hyperlinks in the snippet, though the links seem to work fine without the slash. For example, the link in my snippet says ogdenarea.php, but should say /ogdenarea.php.

We'll see if that corrects the issue.

Ron

[Aaron]

Hi Ron,

What we should do is a redirect - we can set up something in the .htaccess file that will do the wildcards as cal was mentioning about.

So ... I was going to just implement this - however - it's your site - so I thought I'd check how you'd like this done. I see 2 options.

1) http://www.dwellutah.com/idx/land/86...thsaltlake.php
Take that ... and redirect to
http://www.dwellutah.com/northsaltlake.php

OR:

2) http://www.dwellutah.com/idx/land/86...thsaltlake.php
and redirect to:

http://www.dwellutah.com/idx/land/864573/details.html

I'm leaning towards the first option as that was the page it was suppose to be going to ...

It would also work for all the other pages that look like that:

http://www.dwellutah.com/idx/land/86...GeorgeArea.php

Would redirect to:

http://www.dwellutah.com/SaintGeorgeArea.php

Anyway - I've got both solutions ready to go - just let me know which you'd like.


Thank you,

[RJO Salt Lake]

I'll trust your judgement on this, so the one you favor is fine with me.

Just to clarify, this will just clean up the current 'not found" links, correct? Now that I've included the "/" in the hyperlink I shouldn't get any more of these, right?

Also, this just addresses the above issue, but not the "/%E2%80%93" problem?

Thanks, Aaron.

[Aaron]

ok - I'll get that done tomorrow - with the redirect. We'll do this because what I've found is that Google seems to often keep looking for those links and the 404's will grow. It's almost like Google may be using it's own cache to index the sites. But I cannot say for sure. Since the urls are fixed and the redirect will be in place tomorrow the 404s should stop growing.


Correct - the "/%E2%80%93" problem still seems to exist - and I couldn't seem to locate what's causing that ... I'll look further into it.

Thank you,

[RJO Salt Lake]

Thanks again. Glad to be adding some variety to your work day!

[Aaron]

All fixed up. Redirect enabled.

See here http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/thread36812.html for my explanation with the "%E2%80%93" problem.