Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Generating 404 Errors but the Pages Exist

    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.

    Generating 404 Errors but the Pages Exist

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    6
    15
    9955
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Found
      Found last edited by

      Hey

      I have recently come across an issue with several of a sites urls being seen as a 404 by bots such as Xenu, SEOMoz, Google Web Tools etc. The funny thing is, the pages exist and display fine.

      This happens on many of the pages which use the Modx CMS, but the index is fine. The wordpress blog in /blog/ all works fine.

      The only thing I can think of is that I have a conflict in the htaccess, but troubleshooting this is difficult, any tool I have found online seem useless.

      Have tried to rollback to previous versions but still does not work.

      Anyone had any experience of similar issues?

      Many thanks

      K.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • OptimaD
        OptimaD @RyanKent last edited by

        FYI, we finally found our error. The short URL turned out to be the same name as the folder (photo-gallery) so once this was changed, wordpress was able to access the correct path. A bit of custom javascript had to be amended as well, but that was limited to our custom code. Using your web-sniffer.net link we were able to test immediately and fix it fairly quickly. Thank you for your help!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • seo-wanna-bs
          seo-wanna-bs @RyanKent last edited by

          That's true Ryan I guess it is coding related really.

          Issues like this are a real pain in the ass. And most people don't even check WMT to realise the issues exist. TBH, I don't check as often as I should.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • RyanKent
            RyanKent @seo-wanna-bs last edited by

            I agree with you Paul.

            As you pointed out one possible cause is a CMS-related issue which I would refer to as "coding" meaning something in the code which was used to present the website. Perhaps there is a better way to phrase it but nothing comes to mind at the moment.

            Another possibility you mentioned is Litespeed which would be a server-side issue directly. Either way, it is a legitimate issue which should be addressed.

            seo-wanna-bs 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • seo-wanna-bs
              seo-wanna-bs last edited by

              FWIW, I don't think it's a coding issue. If it were coding, it would either show a 200OK or it would show a 404. It wouldn't sometimes serve a 404.

              If you're using Litespeed, I'd guarantee that is the issue and if you're using Joomla, it's another prime culprit.

              RyanKent 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • seo-wanna-bs
                seo-wanna-bs last edited by

                Please keep in mind, that 404 error does not mean the page doesn't exist. It means your server, is sending a response code to indicate that it doesn't exist.

                When I installed Litespeed on my server, this issue happened over and over again.

                I believe Joomla for example, has some kind of security module that serves a 404 if a single IP requests a page too many times. I remember running SEOFrog on a friends Joomla site and tons of 404's were showing up.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • Found
                  Found @RyanKent last edited by

                  Dev team are looking into it, must be quite a complex htaccess issue. Will get to the bottom of it this week and post any findings.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • OptimaD
                    OptimaD @RyanKent last edited by

                    Thanks Ryan! I will get it looked at...Sue

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • RyanKent
                      RyanKent @OptimaD last edited by

                      @DentalID, the same reply I offered to Guy applies for you as well. This is an SEO issue which does need to be fixed. Something on your end is causing the page to show with a 403 response code. You really need a programmer to get in there and determine the root cause of the issue. You could try asking your web host if you have managed hosting, but this level of assistance would normally be outside the support of managed hosting.

                      OptimaD Found 3 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • RyanKent
                        RyanKent last edited by

                        Guy,

                        In looking at the page this appears to be a legitimate problem. Your server settings allow you to present a page with any header code you wish. You can 301 a page but still present the page with a 200 code if you want. Presently it appears the page is being presented fine but your server is offering a 404 header code.

                        I can't tell the actual source of the problem other then to say it appears to be on your end and should be fixed. I originally looked at the code with the MOZbar but then checked independently with another tool as well. http://web-sniffer.net/

                        All tools show a 404 header code for the page. This response code is generated by your web server.

                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                        • OptimaD
                          OptimaD last edited by

                          We are having a similar problem with this URL:  http://dentalimplantsportland.com/photo-gallery/  and also the following locations:

                          http://cosmeticdentistportland.net/photo-gallery/

                          http://dentalveneersportland.com/photo-gallery/

                          SEO Moz  and Google webmaster tools show it as a 403 error but the pages display fine. I am not able to tell if this is really a problem for SEO or if we should reconstruct this gallery system and would really love your input.

                          This is Wordpress with a Spry gallery...

                          Thanks so much!

                          RyanKent 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • Found
                            Found @RyanKent last edited by

                            It is just a small affiliate site I am looking at - this page creates a 404.

                            http://www.insure-uk.com/post-office-car-insurance.html

                            Currently testing on some beta servers. Hopefully should fix soon as otherwise it will lose indexation.

                            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • AlanMosley
                              AlanMosley last edited by

                              I also see this now and again, but next crawl they fix themselfs. i assume robots can not always reach page for a number of reasons

                              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                              • RyanKent
                                RyanKent last edited by

                                Can you offer an example of a URL which is causing this problem?

                                Found 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                • Netboost
                                  Netboost last edited by

                                  I have had the same issues, I think it is often the bot's problem

                                  Just to be certain check your links are correct and manually test them. Also ensure your sitemap is up to date and that you are not blocking the crawlers with metarobots, robots.txt, or some weird stuff in htaccess.

                                  I have found that renaming pages or moving them will often cause 404 issues with crawlers

                                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                  • 1 / 1
                                  • First post
                                    Last post

                                  Got a burning SEO question?

                                  Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                                  Start my free trial


                                  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.

                                  • See all categories

                                  Related Questions

                                  • AdenaSEO

                                    Few pages without SSL

                                    Hi, A website is not fully secured with a SSL certificate.
                                    Approx 97% of the pages on the website are secured. A few pages are unfortunately not secured with a SSL certificate, because otherwise some functions on those pages do not work. It's a website where you can play online games. These games do not work with an SSL connection. Is there anything we have to consider or optimize?
                                    Because, for example when we click on the secure lock icon in the browser, the following notice.
                                    Your connection to this site is not fully secured Can this harm the Google ranking? Regards,
                                    Tom

                                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdenaSEO
                                    1
                                  • henrycabrown

                                    Moved company 'Help Center' from Zendesk to Intercom, got lots of 404 errors. What now?

                                    Howdy folks, excited to be part of the Moz community after lurking for years! I'm a few weeks into my new job (Digital Marketing at Rewind) and about 10 days ago the product team moved our Help Center from Zendesk to Intercom. Apparently the import went smoothly, but it's caused one problem I'm not really sure how to go about solving: https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/***    is where all our articles used to sit https://help.rewind.io/***    is where all our articles now are So, for example, the following article has now moved as such: https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/115001902152-Can-I-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind- https://help.rewind.io/general-faqs-and-billing/frequently-asked-questions/can-i-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind This has created a bunch of broken URLs in places like our Shopify/BigCommerce app listings, in our email drips, and in external resources etc. I've played whackamole cleaning many of these up, but these old URLs are still indexed by Google – we're up to 475 Crawl Errors in Search Console over the past week, all of which are 404s. I reached out to Intercom about this to see if they had something in place to help, but they just said my "best option is tracking down old links and setting up 301 redirects for those particular addressed". Browsing the Zendesk forms turned up some relevant-ish results, with the leading recommendation being to configure javascript redirects in the Zendesk document head (thread 1, thread 2, thread 3) of individual articles. I'm comfortable setting up 301 redirects on our website, but I'm in a bit over my head in trying to determine how I could do this with content that's hosted externally and sitting on a subdomain. I have access to our Zendesk admin, so I can go in and edit stuff there, but don't have experience with javascript redirects and have read that they might not be great for such a large scale redirection. Hopefully this is enough context for someone to provide guidance on how you think I should go about fixing things (or if there's even anything for me to do) but please let me know if there's more info I can provide. Thanks!

                                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | henrycabrown
                                    1
                                  • Alexcox6

                                    Category Page as Shopping Aggregator Page

                                    Hi, I have been reviewing the info from Google on structured data for products and started to ponder. 
                                    https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/products Here is the scenario.
                                    You have a Category Page and it lists 8 products, each products shows an image, price and review rating. As the individual products pages are already marked up they display Rich Snippets in the serps. 
                                    I wonder how do we get the rich snippets for the category page. Now Google suggest a markup for shopping aggregator pages that lists a single product, along with information about different sellers offering that product but nothing for categories. My ponder is this, Can we use the shopping aggregator markup for category pages to achieve the coveted rich results (from and to price, average reviews)? Keen to hear from anyone who has had any thoughts on the matter or had already tried this.

                                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexcox6
                                    0
                                  • monicapopa

                                    Not found errors (404) due to being hacked

                                    Hi Moz Guru's Our website was hacked a few months ago, since then we have taken various measures, last one being redesigning the website all together and removing it from a WordPress platform. So far all is going well, except that the 404 not found errors keeps coming up in Google Webmaster tools. The URLs are spam pages that were created by the virus. And these spam pages have been indexed by Google, and now we are struggling to get rid of them. Is there any way we can deal with these 404 spam pages links? Is marking all of them as fixed in the webmaster tools - search console- crawl errors helpful in any way? Can this have a negative impact on the SEO ? Looking forward to your answers. Many thanks.

                                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monicapopa
                                    0
                                  • Sika22

                                    PDF or HTML Page?

                                    One of our sales team members has created a 25 page word document as a topical page.  The plan was to make this into an html page with a table of contents.  My thoughts were why not make it a pdf?  Is there any con to using a PDF vs an html page?  If the PDF was properly optimized would it perform just as well?  The goal is to have folks click back to our products and hopefully by after reading about how they work.

                                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika22
                                    0
                                  • nicole.healthline

                                    Soft 404's from pages blocked by robots.txt -- cause for concern?

                                    We're seeing soft 404 errors appear in our google webmaster tools section on pages that are blocked by robots.txt (our search result pages). Should we be concerned? Is there anything we can do about this?

                                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline
                                    4
                                  • WebMarketingandDesign

                                    Multiple URLs for the same page

                                    I am working with a client and recently discovered that they have several URLs that go to the same page. http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx
                                    http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx
                                    http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx?nav=FF
                                    http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx?nav=FS
                                    http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?nav=FF
                                    http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?nav=ffhttp://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx?nav=MShttp://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?nav=
                                    http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx?nav=FF#
                                    http://www.maps.com/FunFacts
                                    http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?.nav=FF I am afraid this is happening all over the site. So, my question is: Is this hurting the SEO and how? If so what is the best way to go about fixing this problem? Thanks for your help!

                                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebMarketingandDesign
                                    0
                                  • SamBuck

                                    External 404 vs Internal 404

                                    Which one is bad? External - when someone adds an incorrect link to your site, maybe does a typo when linking to an inner page. This page never existed on your site, google shows this as a 404 in Webmaster tools. Internal - a page existed, google indexed it, and you deleted it and didnt add a 301. Internal ones are in the webmaster's control, and i can understand if google gets upset if it sees a 404 for a URL that existed before, however surely "externally created" 404 shoudnt cause any harm cause that page never existed. And someone has inserted an incorrect link to your site.

                                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck
                                    0

                                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                                  Start my free trial
                                  Products
                                  • Moz Pro
                                  • Moz Local
                                  • Moz API
                                  • Moz Data
                                  • STAT
                                  • Product Updates
                                  Moz Solutions
                                  • SMB Solutions
                                  • Agency Solutions
                                  • Enterprise Solutions
                                  • Digital Marketers
                                  Free SEO Tools
                                  • Domain Authority Checker
                                  • Link Explorer
                                  • Keyword Explorer
                                  • Competitive Research
                                  • Brand Authority Checker
                                  • Local Citation Checker
                                  • MozBar Extension
                                  • MozCast
                                  Resources
                                  • Blog
                                  • SEO Learning Center
                                  • Help Hub
                                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                                  • How-to Guides
                                  • Moz Academy
                                  • API Docs
                                  About Moz
                                  • About
                                  • Team
                                  • Careers
                                  • Contact
                                  Why Moz
                                  • Case Studies
                                  • Testimonials
                                  Get Involved
                                  • Become an Affiliate
                                  • MozCon
                                  • Webinars
                                  • Practical Marketer Series
                                  • MozPod
                                  Connect with us

                                  Contact the Help team

                                  Join our newsletter
                                  Moz logo
                                  © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                                  • Accessibility
                                  • Terms of Use
                                  • Privacy

                                  Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.