How to Handle a Soft 404 error to an admin page in WordPress
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I'm seeing this error on Google Webmaster Console:
| URL: | http://www.awlwildlife.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php |
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| Error details | Linked from | |
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| Last crawled: 11/15/16First detected: 11/15/16The target URL doesn't exist, but your server is not returning a 404 (file not found) error. Learn more
Your server returns a code other than 404 or 410 for a non-existent page (or redirecting users to another page, such as the homepage, instead of returning a 404). This creates a poor experience for searchers and search engines.
More information about "soft 404" errors |
Any ideas what I should do about it?
Thanks!
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Thanks Martijn and Christy!
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Hi Adam,
Yes, as you're using WordPress and this page doesn't provide any content to a search engine anyway (it's your WP Admin). Make sure you add an extra line to your robots.txt file like this:
Disallow: /wp-admin/*
This will make sure GSC and Moz tools won't look at pages on this URL structure at all which is basically what you want here.
Hope this helps!
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GET /organic-clothing/lounge-wear/organic-tunic-top/ HTTP/1.1
Host: earthkindoriginals.co.uk
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:21.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/21.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,/;q=0.8
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Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Cookie: __utma=159840937.1804930013.1369831087.1373619597.1373622660.4; __utmz=159840937.1369831087.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none); wp-settings-1=imgsize%3Dmedium%26hidetb%3D1%26editor%3Dhtml%26urlbutton%3Dnone%26mfold%3Do%26align%3Dcenter%26ed_size%3D160%26libraryContent%3Dbrowse; wp-settings-time-1=1370438004; __utmb=159840937.3.10.1373622660; PHPSESSID=e6f3b379d54c1471a8c662bf52c24543; __utmc=159840937
Connection: keep-alive
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 09:58:33 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.17
X-Pingback: http://earthkindoriginals.co.uk/xmlrpc.php
Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0
Pragma: no-cache
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 6653
Connection: close
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