Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Search Console Errors 400 and 405
-
Hi,
Does anyone know if search console errors showing as follows are damaging to serps:
/xmlrpc.php is returning 405 error
/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php is returning 400 error
These errors seem to of coincided almost to the day that there was a ranking drop for the primary keyword from mid page 1 to bottom of page 2.
No matter what I do I cannot seem to correct these errors.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
-
Both issues are on ALL WordPress sites.
xmlrpc.php return 405 because it's work under HTTP POST but bot crawl under HTTP GET.
And error 405 mean switch from GET to POST. But bot can't do that.admin-ajax.php return 400 because it's not designed for direct use. You must make call with some parameter and it will return some information.
But as name says - it's responsible for AJAX calls and it's not for direct use that's why it return 400 when it's called w/o parameters.So - that issues are not related to your issue.
For example mine WP sites also return same error codes to the bot.Peter
-
To answer your question: "Does anyone know if search console errors showing as follows are damaging to SERPS." - No, this would almost be impossible. The errors that you're mentioning are just two core pages of WordPress that cause some errors where the 400 error is actually supposed to happen as it's not a URL that is just accessible like this. It's a file that is being used to make AJAX requests.
The fact that this potentially coincides with a uplift/drop in rankings is probably caused by something else.
-
Hello there,
Both of this error can be caused by either a corrupted file, which you can download a new one from WordPress and see if this fix the problem.
If not I would suggest you start by turning off all your plugin one by one and see if there's some plugin that caused the conflict.
Hope this helps.
Joseph Yap
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
-
Page disappears from Google search results
Hi, I recently encountered a very strange problem.
Technical SEO | | JoelssonMedia
One of the pages I published in my website ranked very well for a couple of days on top 5, then after a couple of days, the page completely vanished, no matter how direct I search for it, does not appear on the results, I check GSC, everything seems to be normal, but when checking Google analytics, I find it strange that there is no data on the page since it disappeared and it also does not show up on the 'active pages' section no matter how many different computers i keep it open. I have checked to page 9, and used a couple of keyword tools and it appears nowhere! It didn't have any back links, but it was unique and high quality. I have checked on the page does still exist and it is still readable. Has this ´happened to anyone before? Any thoughts would be gratefully received.0 -
Subdomain 403 error
Hi Everyone, A crawler from our SEO tool detects a 403 error from a link from our main domain to a a couple of subdomains. However, these subdomains are perfect accessibly. What could be the problem? Is this error caused by the server, the crawlbot or something else? I would love to hear your thoughts.
Technical SEO | | WeAreDigital_BE
Jens0 -
Find all external 404 errors/links?
Hi All, We have recently discovered a site was linking to our site but it was linking to an incorrect url, resulting in a 404 error. We had only found this by pure chance and wondered if there was a tool out there that will tell us when a site is linking to an incorrect url on our site? Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
Duplicate content and 404 errors
I apologize in advance, but I am an SEO novice and my understanding of code is very limited. Moz has issued a lot (several hundred) of duplicate content and 404 error flags on the ecommerce site my company takes care of. For the duplicate content, some of the pages it says are duplicates don't even seem similar to me. additionally, a lot of them are static pages we embed images of size charts that we use as popups on item pages. it says these issues are high priority but how bad is this? Is this just an issue because if a page has similar content the engine spider won't know which one to index? also, what is the best way to handle these urls bringing back 404 errors? I should probably have a developer look at these issues but I wanted to ask the extremely knowledgeable Moz community before I do 🙂
Technical SEO | | AliMac260 -
?_escaped_fragment_= Duplicate error in Webmaster
Hi I am not sure where this came from ... ?escaped_fragment= But in webmaster we are seeing hundreds of pages with this and thus webmaster is saying that we have Pages with duplicate title tags How do I fix this, or remove it. Regards T
Technical SEO | | Taiger0 -
Yoast SEO. After set up 404 error pages
Hello all, Something strange happened with my blog site. I recently signed to MOZ tools. Initially everything was fine, but during my last crawl I got loads of 404
Technical SEO | | A_Fotografy
pages. Few days ago I was tweaking some settings in SEO plugin according to this post https://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success What I noticed was that 404 pages were coming from my blog posts, but for
some reason category was missing in those posts. For example this link is 404
https://a-fotografy.co.uk/inchcolm-island-wedding-photography-bailie The one with category is https://a-fotografy.co.uk/wedding-pictures/inchcolm-island-wedding-photography-bailie/ So basically for some reason category was missing. Please let me know how can I fix this instead of doing hundreds of
redirects now. Thank you,
Regards,
Armands0 -
How do I "undo" or remove a Google Search Console change of address?
I have a client that set a change of address in Google Search Console where they informed Google that their preferred domain was a subdomain, and now they want Google to also consider their base domain (without the change of address). How do I get the change of address in Google search console removed?
Technical SEO | | KatherineWatierOng0 -
Does a CDN affect search rankings?
I feel kind of stupid asking this, but if i use one it would speed things up quite a bit. It is for a ecommerce website, any guidance on this would be awesome!
Technical SEO | | Hyrule0