404 not working?
-
Apologies - not strictly a search question, although I am concerned that it may be negatively impacting my sites.
If I enter an invalid URL - the "page not found 404 error" doesn't seem to be working. I can enter http://www.%sitename%/index.php/randomnamemadeup/ and it displays the homepage (albeit with a broken CSS).
I can't fathom it out - any help appreciated. Thanks, David
-
I haven't created one - no.
-
Have you made a custom 404 page? If so, yes.
-
Agree - is this likely to sit in htaccess configuration?
-
I would suggest you to fix this issue soon. Otherwise Google may report soft 404 error at one fine day.
Also check your redirect rules. Redirecting error pages to home page should be avoided.
-
Hi Martijn, I seem to have the same issue across a number of my PHP sites.
An industry friend that I link to brought the issue to my attention - he dropped me a line to highlight that alot of these random pages are shown to be linking to his site - rather than just the homepage. I haven't managed to catch up with him to ask where this linking data has come from yet.
Apologies if I haven't explained this very well, but this is high on my list of things I'd like to fix.
- Appreciate there are other things I need to do on this website.
Thanks, David
-
Hi David,
It's not very cool that random urls are not responding with a 404 status code error. But for now I think you have other items to fix first. Because as long as you're not linking external or internal to these 'broken pages' also Google isn't able to find them. And so won't think the site has a lot of soft 404 errors. To be sure the best would be to take a look at the crawl errors within your Google Webmaster Tools account. If there are a lot of recent (soft) 404 pages/ errors found by Google I would move this more to the top of my todo list.
I would prefer myself to fix them later on, but like many things you probably have a lot of other todos you want to take care of first.
Hope this helps!
-
Hi Marisa, try http://www.videogameprices.co.uk/index.php/randomulr/.
Many thanks.
-
We'd need to know your domain name so we can replicate the error.
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
-
Snippet not work for my article in google
I add the script for star snippet in my website but not work in my posts you can see it in this URL https://youtech.ooo/showbox-apk-download/ when I searched in google my custom keyword "Showbox" my competitor show with star snippet in SERP but my site doesn't show snippet stars. Thank You!
Technical SEO | | JackJasonn1 -
404 Error Pages being picked up as duplicate content
Hi, I recently noticed an increase in duplicate content, but all of the pages are 404 error pages. For instance, Moz site crawl says this page: https://www.allconnect.com/sc-internet/internet.html has 43 duplicates and all the duplicates are also 404 pages (https://www.allconnect.com/Coxstatic.html for instance is a duplicate of this page). Looking for insight on how to fix this issue, do I add an rel=canonical tag to these 60 error pages that points to the original error page? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | kfallconnect0 -
Fake 404 Issue
Hello, I just had a problem my site started showing up 404 issues for all my wordpress pages and post but visually the page was loading with content but yet all pages and software including google WMT was showing the 404 issue. I never found the issue but was able to move the site into a new hosting and restore from a backup and it work. Google found the issue on Jan 27th and they remove all the pages with 404 from the index and I lost most of my top ranking I have since fix the issue and was wondering if google would restore my ranking in such a case? Regards, M
Technical SEO | | thewebguy30 -
60,000 404 errors
Do 404 errors on a large scale really matter? I'm just aware that I now have over 60,000 and was wondering if the community think that I should address them by putting 301 redirects in place. Thanks
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Redirect for Soft 404 or 404?
I have a client site that displays properties from the MLS. Once these properties sell they're removed from the MLS and they stop showing up on her site. This would result in a 404 error, but right now any property that's not being found is being 301 redirected back to the property page. I see how this makes sense for a user, but Google is saying there's an increase in Soft 404 errors and I've read that this could negatively affect organic traffic. Should I keep the redirect for removed properties or should I have it serve a 404 with a message that the house you're looking for may have sold and link to the property page? Is it better to have Soft 404 errors or 404 errors?
Technical SEO | | JaredDetroit0 -
404's in WMT are old pages and referrer links no longer linking to them.
Within the last 6 days, Google Webmaster Tools has shown a jump in 404's - around 7000. The 404 pages are from our old browse from an old platform, we no longer use them or link to them. I don't know how Google is finding these pages, when I check the referrer links, they are either 404's themselves or the page exists but the link to the 404 in question is not on the page or in the source code. The sitemap is also often referenced as a referrer but these links are definitely not in our sitemap and haven't been for some time. So it looks to me like the referrer data is outdated. Is that possible? But somehow these pages are still being found, any ideas on how I can diagnose the problem and find out how google is finding them?
Technical SEO | | rock220 -
Why would SEOMoz and GWT report 404 errors for pages that are not 404ing?
Recently, I've noticed that nearly all of the 404 errors (not soft 404) reported in GWT actually resolve to a legitimate page. This was weird, but I thought it might just be old info, so I would go through the process of checking and "mark as fixed" as necessary. However, I noticed that SEOMoz is picking up on these 404 errors in the diagnostics of the site as well, and now I'm concerned with what the problem could be. Anyone have any insight into this? Rich
Technical SEO | | secretstache0 -
Has anyone worked with Edgecast?
They have a caching system where they assign multiple ip's based on location and we are curious how it affects SEO.
Technical SEO | | DragonSearch1