Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Difference between urls and referring urls?
-
Sorry, nit new to this side of SEO
We recently discovered we have over 200 critical crawler issues on our site (mainly 4xx)
We exported the CSV and it shows both a URL link and a referring URL. Both lead to a 'page not found' so I have two questions?
What is the difference between a URL and a referring URL?
What is the best practice/how do we fix this issue? Is it one for our web developer?
Appreciate the help.
-
No. The referring URL is a page on your site that has a broken link on it. These are damaging your rankings so so fix ASAP. Go to all the referring pages and fix or remove the links with the URL in.
-
I believe "URL" is the page on your website that is 404ing/Broken, the "Referring URL" is the website someone found your URL on and clicked through to. For example, if you had a broken link on a Facebook post you did, it would show the URL as "yourwebsite.com/examply" (broken link) and the Referring URL would be "facebook.com/yourprofile".
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Moz-Specific 404 Errors Jumped with URLs that don't exist
Hello, I'm going to try and be as specific as possible concerning this weird issue, but I'd rather not say specific info about the site unless you think it's pertinent. So to summarize, we have a website that's owned by a company that is a division of another company. For reference, we'll say that: OURSITE.com is owned by COMPANY1 which is owned by AGENCY1 This morning, we got about 7,000 new errors in MOZ only (these errors are not in Search Console) for URLs with the company name or the agency name at the end of the url. So, let's say one post is: OURSITE.com/the-article/ This morning we have an error in MOZ for URLs OURSITE.com/the-article/COMPANY1 OURSITE.com/the-article/AGENCY1 x 7000+ articles we have created. Every single post ever created is now an error in MOZ because of these two URL additions that seem to come out of nowhere. These URLs are not in our Sitemaps, they are not in Google... They simply don't exist and yet MOZ created an an error with them. Unless they exist and I don't see them. Obviously there's a link to each company and agency site on the site in the about us section, but that's it.
Moz Pro | | CJolicoeur0 -
Google Site search operator showing different results than Search Console
Hey everybody, I am seeing some confusing results. I am seeing that in the back of our Search Console we are showing around 4,500 sites indexed. If I use the "site" operator in google, only 2820 show up... any thoughts as to why that happens?
Moz Pro | | HashtagHustler1 -
URL Length Issue
MOZ is telling me the URLs are too long. I did a little research and I found out that the length of the URLs is not really a serious problem. In fact, others recommend ignoring the situation. Even on their blog I found this explanation: "Shorter URLs are generally preferable. You do not need to take this to the extreme, and if your URL is already less than 50-60 characters, do not worry about it at all. But if you have URLs pushing 100+ characters, there's probably an opportunity to rewrite them and gain value. This is not a direct problem with Google or Bing - the search engines can process long URLs without much trouble. The issue, instead, lies with usability and user experience. Shorter URLs are easier to parse, copy and paste, share on social media, and embed, and while these may all add up to a fractional improvement in sharing or amplification, every tweet, like, share, pin, email, and link matters (either directly or, often, indirectly)." And yet, I have these questions: In this case, why do I get this error telling me that the urls are too long, and what are the best practices to get this out? Thank You
Moz Pro | | Cart_generation1 -
404 Crawl Diagnostics with void(0) appended to URL
Hello I am getting loads of 404 reported in my Crawl report, all appended with void(0) at the end. For example: http://lfs.org.uk/films-and-filmmakers/watch-our-films/1289/void(0)
Moz Pro | | moshen
The site is running on Drupal 7, Has anyone come across this before? Kind Regards Moshe | http://lfs.org.uk/films-and-filmmakers/watch-our-films/1289/void(0) |0 -
Woocommerce filter urls showing in crawl results, but not indexed?
I'm getting 100's of Duplicate Content warnings for a Woocommerce store I have. The urls are
Moz Pro | | JustinMurray
etc These don't seem to be indexed in google, and the canonical is for the shop base url. These seem to be simply urls generated by Woocommerce filters. Is this simply a false alarm from Moz crawl?0 -
Canonical URLs all show trailing slash on main site pages - using Yoast SEO for Wordpress - how to correct
We are using Yoast for a number of our sites. We use naked domain as the canonical. I have noticed in the header tags that all our sites show the canonical URLs as having a trailing slash: Example: http;//foxspizzajc.com, when I look at the source code, it shows the canonical as http;//foxspizzajc.com/ Of course, it is much more likely that all sites that link to us will not use the trailing slash - so preferably we do not want that to be the canonical - among other reasons. Does this need to be fixed so the trailing slash is removed? I cannot see how to do this in Yoast SEO or in Permalinks structure for Wordpress. Sorry for my ignorance. Thanks for any help.
Moz Pro | | Adam_RushHour_Marketing1 -
What Is he Difference Between Google UK and Google Great Britain
When setting up a campaign for keywords and selected search engines. I am targeting a UK market so obviously Google.co.uk is my main target. However when I set up the campaign i select Google as the SE but it asks me if I want United Kingdom or Great Britain. I selected United Kingdom and it has been returning 0 results for rankings even though I can physically see them in the SERPS. Does anyone know exactly what is the difference between the UK and GB options. I assume I should of specified GB but not sure. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks
Moz Pro | | hanv0 -
Is there a tool to upload multiple URLs and gather statistics and page rank?
I was wondering if there is a tool out there where you can compile a list of URL resources, upload them in a CSV and run a report to gather and index each individual page. Does anyone know of a tool that can do this or do we need to create one?
Moz Pro | | Brother220