Wordpress No 404
-
Hello,
My issue is that in wordpress 404 does not seem to be working properly.
An example of this is:
sitename.com/category/catname loads the files in that category but I can also type
sitename.com/category/asdasfaasd/catname and it still goes to the posts in that category and does not 404. I can replace the misc text with anything and it does not 404.
My worry is that this can be used to exploit duplicate content.
I've looked at a couple of other sites and they do the same.
I'm using Yoast as my SEO plugin and my theme is elogix from themeforest.
I've tried disabling all plugins, cloudflare and changing theme and the same issue exists.
If anyone can help it would be extremely appreciated.
-
Hi Paul,
Will do. I forgot to mention but I actually found the flaw with the 404 when I was looking at the SEOmoz crawler statistics. It said that my sub categories were duplicate content as the pages it was referring to were assigned to multiple categories.
An example roughly based on my structure that it detected as duplicate content is the posts existing in: /category/seo/no1 and /category/seo/no2 so as a result it was duplicate content. I deleted the sub categories and assigned them all to just the SEO category and realised that the sub categories were still resolving so to troubleshoot this I decided to add a random prefix to the end e.g. /seo/asdnas and the address still resolved to the root category.
My theory was that if someone generated for example 100 urls and built links that google would see it as 100 duplicate pages due to the fact it was not 404ing or changing url when as you said 301ing.
I will close the thread and mark your question as good answer.
Cheers.
-
Hmmm... you should be seeing the URL change in the browser's address bar after the redirect pushes to the corrected URL, Luke. I certainly do in my installs that I confirmed it with.
At any rate, if this answered your question fully, would be a good idea to mark the question as "Answered" to help other users. I'd also love a mark as "Good Answer if you found it valuable.
And yea, absolutely - something new to learn every day. That's what I love about this business I only remember seeing this correction functionality mentioned once in passing in some documentation, but I couldn't find it by search even though i knew what I was looking for. So no wonder you couldn't scrounge it up.
Paul
-
Hi Paul,
Thanks for clearing that up for me!. When I was playing with it I was extremely confused as normally 301 actually redirects and shows the new URL.
As a temporary solution I ended up stripping the category base meaning it now 404s or 301s to the correct page if you try any of the things I originally mentioned.
I actually did a fair bit of research on it prior to asking on SEOmoz and could not find anything at all about it. I even asked a couple of web developers I know who use Joomla and Drupal and they could not figure it out either.
You clearly do learn something new every day as I had no idea about this prior to your reply.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my question and clearing it up for me, it's appreciated,
Luke
-
WordPress has this error-correction functionality built-in, Luke.
If you user a server header checking tool on that non-existent URL, you'll see that WP is automatically using a 301-redirect to push the user to the correct address each time - so no duplicate content or split authority problems at all.
Paul
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
-
Hostage Taking by My Wordpress Developer
Since 2013 a Wordpress developer has coded my real estate website. Their hourly rate is $24 but the programmers take too long to perform tasks and the service has become prohibitively expensive. Examples of unreasonable time estimates below: | | 1. Change theme settings so posts/pages do not display a date. -> 7 hrs
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
2.Google search results are displaying the breadcrumb on the top of each page rather than the URL. Please correct so this does not display. -> 3 hrs
3. Install SSL certificate to www.metro-manhattan.com domain -> 8 hrs | | The above does not include 5-6 hours for testing. I am considering changing vendors. Potential programmers have asked how the site was developed and to what extent is it is customized. Ends up several plugins were built from scratch. My question is whether a new developer is going to be able to pick up a custom coded site. That without understanding how the site was built, any change will break the site. My concern is that current developer has made themselves indispensable, and created a situation where there is no alternative to using them and they can therefore charge any price they want.Any thoughts? Also below are questions I asked my developer about how the site was built and their answers: | 1. Was everything coded using a child theme?
No, is a custom theme. 2. Did you use any ready made theme or just plugins
We used the theme and and we've used plugins. Third party plugins and plugins builded from scratch 3. Can Wordpress and every one of the plugin be updated?
Wordpress can be updated, core files was never modified. If after an update something start to work wrong is due to some radical wordpress change or similar Can't be updated: FireStorm Professional Real Estate Plugin Created at xxx: Form Submissions Report Miscellaneous Hooks and Filters NYC Check memory usage NYC SEO listings NYC Slider Sitemap Updater 4. Were any of the plugins customized and if so, which ones?
Yes, this plugin "FireStorm Professional Real Estate Plugin" |0 -
Removing dates from wordpress blog URL
Hi all, Ours is website's blog is built with wordpress. We used to have the below URL pattern like may other websites: www.website.com/blog/2016/04/10/topic-on-how-to-optimise-blog. Recently we removed the date and made the URL pattern to just like: www.website.com/blog/topic-on-how-to-optimise-blog All the links have been generated with new URLs across the blog. Still all the old URLs have been reported as crawl errors in search console. I am wondering will there be any auto redirect formula to redirect all the old URLs to new URLs. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Is it bad practice to create pages that 404?
We have member pages on our site that are initially empty, until the member does some activity. Currently, since all of these pages are soft 404s, we return a 404 for all these pages and all internal links to them are js links (not links as far as bots are concerned). As soon as the page has content, we switch it to 200 and make the links into regular hrefs. After doing some research, I started thinking that this is not the best way to handle this situation. A better idea would be to noindex/follow the pages (before they have content) and let the links to these pages be real links. I'd love to hear input and feedback from fellow Mozzers. What are your thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
What's the Best Host For WordPress sites
Our site has gone down twice in a week...hosted by Fat Cow. So we're going to switch hosts this week. We currently have 2 WP sites on a Fat Cow VPS. 8 GB file size and 2 GB data transfer monthly. We use a CDN and video hosting company (Wistia) so the file sizes are small. I've contacted several hosts and narrowed it down to WP Engine, Rack Space and A Small Orange. I care about fast page load time (1 second), 99.999% up-time and great support. Price is a secondary concern. I'm leaning towards WP Engine, but wanted to ask Moz community before making a decision. Any other hosting companies I should call?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Branden_S0 -
Wordpress: Too Many Links + Trackback 302
Hey, I see that all the blogposts that we have done to date (6) are being showing as having too many on page links in the seomoz crawl but I am quite confused about this as I cannot count more than 30 (including side bar, footer and header) per post. Can anyone shed any light on why this may be occuring and/or how I can check which links are being picked up? Secondly I have a number of temporary redirect warnings all related to the blog. The 'trackback' URL of each post to date has a 302 direct to it's respective blog post. What is the best solution here? Change to a 301 possibly? Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jannkuzel0 -
Soft 404 problem
I have a soft 404 problem in webmaster tools for http://www.musicliveuk.com/about/feed and I'm not sure why. I read on here that if it is a main content page it should be fixed but I don't know how. I've tried to 301 redirect the page to http://www.musicliveuk.com/about/ but the redirect doesn't appear to be working? how do I fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
What to do with WordPress generated pages?
I'm an SEOmoz Newbie and have a very specific question about the auto generated WordPress Pages. SEOmoz caught and labeled the auto generated WP pages as Crawl Warnings like: Long URL - 302 - Title Element to Long - Missing Meta Description Tag - Too Many On-Page Links So I have learned the lesson and have now made those pages "no follow" / "no idex." HOWEVER, WHAT DO I DO WITH THE ONES THAT HAVE ALREADY BEEN INDEXED? Do I... 1. Just leave them as is a hope they don't hurt me from an SEO perspective? 2. Redirect them all to a relevant page? I'm sure many people have had this issue. What do you think? Thanks Dominic
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amorbis0 -
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 | | SamBuck0