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".
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
-
Why Do Different Tools Report 404s Differently?
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!
Moz Pro | | EricFish0 -
What is the best way to treat URLs ending in /?s=
Hi community, I'm going through the list of crawl errors visible in my MOZ dashboard and there's a few URLs ending in /?s= How should I treat these URLs? Redirects? Thanks for any help
Moz Pro | | Easigrass0 -
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 -
Block Moz (or any other robot) from crawling pages with specific URLs
Hello! Moz reports that my site has around 380 duplicate page content. Most of them come from dynamic generated URLs that have some specific parameters. I have sorted this out for Google in webmaster tools (the new Google Search Console) by blocking the pages with these parameters. However, Moz is still reporting the same amount of duplicate content pages and, to stop it, I know I must use robots.txt. The trick is that, I don't want to block every page, but just the pages with specific parameters. I want to do this because among these 380 pages there are some other pages with no parameters (or different parameters) that I need to take care of. Basically, I need to clean this list to be able to use the feature properly in the future. I have read through Moz forums and found a few topics related to this, but there is no clear answer on how to block only pages with specific URLs. Therefore, I have done my research and come up with these lines for robots.txt: User-agent: dotbot
Moz Pro | | Blacktie
Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0 User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0 My questions: 1. Are the above lines correct and would block Moz (dotbot and rogerbot) from crawling only pages that have numberOfStars=0 parameter in their URLs, leaving other pages intact? 2. Do I need to have an empty line between the two groups? (I mean between "Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0" and "User-agent: rogerbot")? (or does it even matter?) I think this would help many people as there is no clear answer on how to block crawling only pages with specific URLs. Moreover, this should be valid for any robot out there. Thank you for your help!0 -
Special Characters in URL & Google Search Engine (Index & Crawl)
G'd everyone, I need help with understanding how special characters impact SEO. Eg. é , ë ô in words Does anyone have good insights or reference material regarding the treatment of Special Characters by Google Search Engine? how Page Title / Meta Desc with Special Chars are being index & Crawl Best Practices when it comes to URLs - uses of Unicode, HTML entity references - when are where? any disadvantage using special characters Does special characters in URL have any impact on SEO performance & User search, experience. Thanks heaps, Amy
Moz Pro | | LabeliumUSA0 -
Crawlers crawl weird long urls
I did a crawl start for the first time and i get many errors, but the weird fact is that the crawler tracks duplicate long, not existing urls. For example (to be clear): there is a page: www.website.com/dogs/dog.html but then it is continuing crawling:
Moz Pro | | r.nijkamp
www.website.com/dogs/dog.html
www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dog.html
www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dogs/dog.html
www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dogs/dogs/dog.html
www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dogs/dogs/dogs/dog.html what can I do about this? Screaming Frog gave me the same issue, so I know it's something with my website0 -
Duplicate page titles are the same URL listed twice
The system says I have two duplicate page titles. The page titles are exactly the same because the two URLs are exactly the same. These same two identical URLs show up in the Duplicate Page Content also - because they are the same. We also have a blog and there are two tag pags showing identical content - I have blocked the blog in robots.txt now, because the blog is only for writers. I suppose I could have just blocked the tags pages.
Moz Pro | | loopyal0 -
Use of the tilde in URLs
I just signed up for SEOMoz and sent my site through the first crawl. I use the tilde in my rewritten URLs. This threw my entire site into the Notice section 301 (permanent redirect) since each page redirects to the exact URL with the ~, not the %7e. I find conflicting information on the web - you can use the tilde in more recent coding guidelines where you couldn't in the old. It would be a huge thing to change every page in my site to use an underscore instead of a tilde int he URL. If Google is like SEOMoz and is 301 redirecting every page on the site, then I'll do it, but is it just an SEOMoz thing? I ran my site through Firebug and and all my pages show the 200 response header, not the 301 redirect. Thanks for any help you can provide.
Moz Pro | | fdb0