Google is showing 404 error. What should I do?
-
Dear Experts,
Though few of my website pages are accessible, Google is showing 404 error. What should I do? Even moz reports gives me the same.
Problems:
1. Few of my Pages are not yet catched in Google. (Earlier all of them were catched by Google)
2. Tried to fetch the those pages, but Google says, page not found.
3. Included them in sitemap, the result is the same.Please advice:
Note: I have recently changed my hosting server.
-
You're welcome!
-
Everything is perfect now. The pages I mentioned are indexed now. Thank you Monica.
-
Yes rectified the problem. Accidentally our developers had included a php code on the header and we didnt notice. Finally identified and removed them.
BTW, thanks for your suggestion.
-
Hey There
Are you all set? One thing to consider is sometimes browsers see things differently then search crawlers or web crawlers. Try a header checker like http://urivalet.com/ _and make sure to test different user agents _- like Chrome, Googlebot etc. Check the response code for each user agent. Maybe your browser sees a 200 but Googlebot sees a 404.
-
If you are logged into your admin panel, the one for your website, you will see every page most of the time.
Have you no followed those pages? Did you change the URL? If you changed the URL without redirecting the old URL you will get a 404 error. Make sure that when you changed your hosting solution that the URL structure didn't change for some reason.
-
I am very sure that, the page "A" is working perfectly.
Sure, Let me try Screaming frog crawl and keep you posted on the result.
BTW, thank you so much for your time and response as well.
-
Screaming frog crawls your site "live" Moz & Google don't so it should show you any current 404 errors. the 404 is showing because the page is not there, you would 301 a 404 page to change it from a 404 to a 200 code.
IN short a 301 is to make it so a user lands on the page and rather than find nothing they find something.
Are you sure Page "A" is working and are you sure its page A that's the problem not something odd like page "A.php" etc. ?
Run screaming frog and see if that helps with finding 404's
-
Hello Pixel,
Thank you for the response. My question is, when the pages are working, why do you want me to go with either 301 or other options. I am very sure that the page are working. After changing the hosting service only I am into this problem.
For ex: I have a page named "A". And this page is working perfectly when I tried to access it. And the same file is found on the server as well. But the tools are saying the page not found. What could be the reason.
Thank you.
-
You can use Screaming frog to find the 404 pages, from there you can either 301 them into the correct pages or a very similar page to help prevent the issue. You should also create a soft 404 page this is a page that shows a message like "opps we can't find your page" and then directs users (and bots) to a similar page or a homepage so its not such a dead end.
I'm a bit confused as what you mean by "what to do" You can either fix them by putting content on them or 301 them to the correct page.
Hope that helps.
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
-
Is my site penalized by Google?
Let's say my website is aaaaa.com and company name is aaaaa Systems. When I search Google aaaaa my site do not come up at all. When I search for "aaaaa Systems" it comes up. But in WMT I see quite a few clicks from aaaaa as keyword. Most of the traffic is brand keywords only. I never received any manual penalty in WMT ever. Is the site penalized or regular algorithm issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajiabs0 -
Miniclip has a search box showing in Google SERP: how?
For their brand keyword search - miniclip - Google SERP includes a search box reading "Search miniclip.com". Any one has an idea how this can be done?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekg0 -
Robot.txt error
I currently have this under my robot txt file: User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rubix
Disallow: /authenticated/
Disallow: /css/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /js/
Disallow: /PayPal/
Disallow: /Reporting/
Disallow: /RegistrationComplete.aspx WebMatrix 2.0 On webmaster > Health Check > Blocked URL I copy and paste above code then click on Test, everything looks ok but then logout and log back in then I see below code under Blocked URL: User-agent: * Disallow: / WebMatrix 2.0 Currently, Google doesn't index my domain and i don't understand why this happening. Any ideas? Thanks Seda0 -
Does google penalize for banner ads?
client has banners on site 1 linking to site 2 and vice-versa but these links are auto generated with each blog post ( new post means new ad link) is this a problem? see, its not like he just has one banner on reach site pointing back to the other - his ads automatically appear on each page that a blog post is posted - im sure you know what i mean but im trying to to my best to make sense here everytime another blog post is created for site 1 then another banner is also created linking to site 2 client thinks it may be a big problem - is it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ezpro90 -
Effect of I-Frame on Google Rank
My commercial real estate web site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) allows visitors to search for office space listings. The site sources listings through a third party and they are displayed in an i-frame. The i-frame directs visitors to listing pages such as: http://listings.nyc-officespace-leader.com/getspace.mpl?sp_id=A0173921&cust_id=offspldr Atleast 10,000 of these pages have backlinks to my site. My question is the following: Could these tens of thoudands of alpha numeric URLs be detrimental to my sites ranking on Google after the Panda/Penguin updates? SIte traffic dropped from 7,000 per month to about 3,300 after the April Google update. Rewriting content for dozens of pages and adding a blog have only somewhat mitigated the negative effects of Panda/Penguin. Could Google be viewing these links from the third party lisitng provider as a negative when they viewed these links as a plus before? Any downside to removing the third party links and parsing these listings from landlord websited and displaying them as part of my site with their own URL, title tag, description tag? Obviously the new URLS would not be alphanumeric. If these links have not caused the drop in traffic last April, what could be responsible? Thanks in advance for your opinion!!! Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Robots.txt error message in Google Webmaster from a later date than the page was cached, how is that?
I have error messages in Google Webmaster that state that Googlebot encountered errors while attempting to access the robots.txt. The last date that this was reported was on December 25, 2012 (Merry Christmas), but the last cache date was November 16, 2012 (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.etundra.com/robots.txt&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a). How could I get this error if the page hasn't been cached since November 16, 2012?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eTundra0 -
Google Local oddity
So I spotted something a little weird... one of my client's Google Local placements in blended results has the domain name - complete with the .com extension appearing where the business name typically appears: Businessxyz.com www. businessxyz .com of Google reviews Has anyone seen this? I setup their Google Places account quite some time ago and used the business name - not the url. I also setup their Google+ and Local page - using the name. None of the page titles on the website contain the url. I simply can not pinpoint where G is pulling this from or why for that matter. All competitors are appearing with business name - only my client has the domain name visible for the particular local search query. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCW0 -
GOOGLE Rankings
We built a site for one of our clients about 3 years ago and added Meta tags to each page of the site. But when you do a google search on the keywords the site still does not come up. I thought it would be spidered into the system by now. Web Site - www.specialtysealgroup.com Let me know what we can do to improve our GOOGLE rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thine1230