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
-
Need suggestion for URL structure to show my website in Google News section
I need suggestion for URL structure to include my news section in Google News.Google recommend any specific URL structure to include website in Google News.?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Google is indexing the wrong page
Hello, I have a site I am optimizing and I cant seem to get a particular listing onto the first page due to the fact google is indexing the wrong page. I have the following scenario. I have a client with multiple locations. To target the locations I set them up with URLs like this /<cityname>-wedding-planner.</cityname> The home page / is optimized for their port saint lucie location. the page /palm-city-wedding-planner is optimized for the palm city location. the page /stuart-wedding-planner is optimized for the stuart location. Google picks up the first two and indexes them properly, BUT the stuart location page doesnt get picked up at all, instead google lists / which is not optimized at all for stuart. How do I "let google know" to index the stuart landing page for the "stuart wedding planner" term? MOZ also shows the / page as being indexed for the stuart wedding planner term as well but I assume this is just a result of what its finding when it performs its searches.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mediagiant0 -
We are ignored by Google - what should we do?
Hi, We believe that our website - https://en.greatfire.org - is being all but ignored by Google Search. The following two examples illustrate our case. 1. Searching for “China listening in on Skype - Microsoft assumes you approve”. This is the title of a blog post that we wrote which received some 50,000 visits. On Yahoo and Bing search, we rank first for this search. On Google, however, we rank 7th. Each of the six pages ranking higher than us are quoting and linking to our story. 2. Searching for “Online Censorship In China”. This is the title of our front page. Yahoo and Bing both rank us third for this search. On Google, however, we are not even among the first 300 results. Two of the pages among the first 10 results link to us. Our website has an average of around 1000 visits per day. We are quoted in and linked from virtually all Western mainstream media (see https://en.greatfire.org/press). Yet to this day we are receiving almost no traffic from Google Search. Our mission is to bring transparency to online censorship in China. If people could find us in Google, it would greatly help to spread awareness of the extent of Internet restrictions here. If you could indicate to us what the cause of our poor rankings could be, we would be very grateful. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GreatFire.org0 -
Indexed Pages in Google, How do I find Out?
Is there a way to get a list of pages that google has indexed? Is there some software that can do this? I do not have access to webmaster tools, so hoping there is another way to do this. Would be great if I could also see if the indexed page is a 404 or other Thanks for your help, sorry if its basic question 😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
So What On My Site Is Breaking The Google Guidelines?
I have a site that I'm trying to rank for the Keyword "Jigsaw Puzzles" I was originally ranked around #60 or something around there and then all of a sudden my site stopped ranking for that keyword. (My other keyword rankings stayed) Contacted Google via the site reconsideration and got the general response... So I went through and deleted as many links as I could find that I thought Google may not have liked... heck, I even removed links that I don't think I should have JUST so I could have this fixed. I responded with a list of all links I removed and also any links that I've tried to remove, but couldn't for whatever reasons. They are STILL saying my website is breaking the Google guidelines... mainly around links. Can anyone take a peek at my site and see if there's anything on the site that may be breaking the guidelines? (because I can't) Website in question: http://www.yourjigsawpuzzles.co.uk UPDATE: Just to let everyone know that after multiple reconsideration requests, this penalty has been removed. They stated it was a manual penalty. I tried removing numerous different types of links but they kept saying no, it's still breaking rules. It wasn't until I removed some website directory links that they removed this manual penalty. Thought it would be interesting for some of you guys.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardTaylor0 -
Google Webmasters not Accurate
I recently updated all the Meta titles, descriptions and keywords on my website because in the past most were duplicate and/or written in the incorrect language. According to Webmaster Tools they have indexed our site post update, but we still have the same number of HTML issues. When I click to investigate the issues further it is clear they are reflecting the old Meta not the new stuff we just added. Should this fix itself the next time Google crawls my site or is there something else I should be doing about the issue? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Do I need a canonical tag on the 404 error page?
Per definition, a 404 is displayed for different url (any not existing url ...). As I try to clean my website following SEOmoz pro advices, SEOmoz notify me of duplicate content on urls leading to a 404 🙂 This is I guess not that important, but just curious: should we add a cononical tag to the template returning the 404, with a canonical url such as www.mysite.com/404 ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nuxeo0 -
Status Code 404: But why?
Google Web Master Tool reported me that I have several 404 staus code., First they were 2, after 4..6 and 10, right now. Every time I add a new page. I've got a no CMS managed website. After old website was been deleted, I installed Wordpress, created new page and deleted and blocked (robots.txt) old page. Infact all page not found don't exist!!! (Pic: Page not found). The strange thing is that no pages link to those 404 pages (All Wordpress Created page are new!!!). Seomoz doesn't report me any 404 error (Pic 3) I controlled all my pages: No "strange" link in any pages No link reported by Seomoz tool Bu why GWMT reports me that one? How can I risolve that problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Greenman
I'm going crazy!!! Regards
Antonio BgelG.png eCaDU.png ZIi2f.jpg0