7000 vs 30000

We just ran a crawl on our site and found that although we have like 7000 pages indexed in Google,
but 30000 pages (Not to be confused with links) are giving a 404 error.

We used a service called DeepCrawl.com

How is this possible?

Plus is this bad for rankings?

Thx!

Doesn't the indexing tool give you a report? You need to find what "pages" and giving a 404.

Sometimes you get situation where you have a relative link that is not properly defined.

For example you might have a root page on your site - page.html
And a link to it in your footer like this-
A href="page.html"

From homepage that link will work, but if you are in a sub directory like site.com/section2/
Then that footer link will point to site.com/section2/page.html which won't actually exist and thus would produce 404.

Anyway that's just a guess but you need to try and get some reporting details from the site map tool that you used.

Thanks for your reply David. I'm going through the list right now and finding out most of these are coming form just on specific section of our site. Thanks for the great tip. I guess in SEO, an issue is not always what it seems. Always investigate further. Thx!

Have you checked on WMT to see what the errors are about?

This amount of 404 can harm your website. Need to check if any of these pages used to receive any traffic or backlinks in the past.

Redirect all the 404 Errors to home page or its corresponding pages.

Otherwise,It will affect on your ranking in SERP.

antiarrest said:

Have you checked on WMT to see what the errors are about?

Click to expand...

Thx for the replies everyone - Issue is still ongoing - What is WMT? Webmaster Toolbox (Google Webmaster)?