404 Error on Spider Emulators
-
I recently began working at a company called Uncommon Goods. I ran a few different spider emulators on our homepage (uncommongoods.com) and I saw a 404 Error on SEO-browser.com as well as URL errors on Summit Media's emulator and SEOMoz's crawler. It seems there is a serious problem here. How is this affecting our site from an SEO standpoint? What are the repercussions?
Also, I know we have a lot of javascript on our homepage..is this causing the 404? Any advice would be much appreciated.
Thanks!
-Zack
-
Hey Zack,
It seems your website is now returning a 200 so you apparently managed to fix the problem.
Was the problem coming from the server configuration as I suggested?
Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer. -
Hi Zack,
Yes, having the home page return a 404 error is a HUGE problem. It actually tells the engines that the page doesn't exist so they will stop crawling it and eventualy drop it from their index even if it returns content.
You should solve this problem ASAP!
Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer. -
Hi Guillaume,
Your comments about Javascript on the client side make complete sense to me now and I will examine our Resin config w/ my IT team. Thanks for explaining. Also, as per Beneeb's advice above, I'm going to try making some changes to robots.txt.
From a bigger picture perspective though, do you think this 404 Error is even that big of a deal? Are we likely to be penalized for this in terms of Page Rank, Domain Authority, etc..??
Thanks for your help!
-Zack
-
Hi Zack,
The 404 error has nothing to do with the robots.txt file, it has to do with your server configuration as I said in my answers bellow.
About the robots.txt file, I would remove the Disallow: line if you don't need to block anything.
Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer. -
Hi Beneeb,
That tool is awesome! It definitely helps, thanks! I'm going to show that report to my IT guys today. I think your guess is a very good one. Hopefully I can persuade them to make the changes and we'll see if it resolves the error.
Best Regards,
-Zack
-
Hi Zack,
To be honest with you, it was just a guess. I used a robots.txt syntax checker and saw several issues. You can check out that same tool here & run your current robots.txt file through it:
http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml
I hope that gets you pushed in the right direction. I'm very new to SEO, but I've worked in the technical support world forever. So, my suggestion is only worth what you paid for it.
-
Hi Beeneeb,
Thank you for your insight. I think this makes sense as I see there is some redundancy in robots.txt as it is now. I'm curious however, why do you think that changing robots.txt will resolve the 404 error?
Best Regards,
-Zack
-
Hi Zack,
Quick followup : Your website will always return 500 to HTTP/1.0 queries. With HTTP/1.1, homepage returns 404 and subpages returns 200.
I saw the website was running on a Resin server rather than a Apache server, then, you might want to look into your Resin server's configuration.
Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer. -
Hi Zack,
Actually, when I use this http header tool and that I input http://www.uncommongoods.com/ I see that the header returned is in fact a 500 Internal Server Error.
The HTTP Header is returned by the server even before the browser can kow that their is javascript on that page so it has nothing to do with javascript.
You'll have to look at the server side as an Internal Server Error and the HTTP Header are returned by the server in opposite to the javascript that is executed client send.
Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer. -
Hi Zack,
Looking at your robots.txt file, you have several errors. I would replace your current robots.txt file with the following:
User-Agent: *
Disallow:Sitemap: http://www.uncommongoods.com/sitemap.xml
(not sure why the message truncated your sitemap file, but you get the picture)
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
-
Errors In Search Console
Hi All, I am hoping someone might be able to help with this. Last week one of my sites dropped from mid first day to bottom of page 1. We had not been link building as such and it only seems to of affected a single search term and the ranking page (which happens to be the home page). When I was going through everything I went to search console and in crawl errors there are 2 errors that showed up as detected 3 days before the drop. These are: wp-admin/admin-ajax.php showing as response code 400 and also xmlrpc.php showing as response code 405 robots.txt is as follows: user-agent: * disallow: /wp-admin/ allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php Any help with what is wrong here and how to fix it would be greatly appreciated. Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | DaleZon0 -
Getting rid of pagination - redirect all paginated pages or leave them to 404?
Hi all, We're currently in the process of updating our website and we've agreed that one of the things we want to do is get rid of all our pagination (currently used on the blog and product review areas) and instead implement load more on scroll. The question I have is... should we redirect all of the paginated pages and if so, where to? (My initial thoughts were either to the blog homepage or to the archive page) OR do we leave them to just 404? Bear in mind we have thousands of paginated pages 😕 Here's our blog area btw - https://www.ihasco.co.uk/blog Any help would be appreciated, thanks!
Technical SEO | | iHasco0 -
Duplicate title error in GWT over spelling in URL
Hi, How do I resolve a duplicate title error in GWT over spelling in URL? Ttile of Post: Minneapolis Median Home Sales Price Up 16 Percent Not sure how this happened, but I have two URL versions show up. Even with a 301 redirect, the both remain an error in GWT. /real-estate-blog/Minneapolis-median-home-sales-price-up-16-percent and /real-estate-blog/minneapolis-median-home-sales-price-up-16-percent
Technical SEO | | jessential0 -
Wordpress 4xx errors from comment re-direct
About a month ago, we had a massive jump in 4XX errors. It seems the majority are being caused by the comment tool on wordpress, which is generating a link that looks like this "http://www.turnerpr.com/blog/wp-login.php?redirect_to=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.turnerpr.com%2Fblog%2F2013%2F09%2Fturners-crew-royal-treatment-well-sort-of%2Fphoto-2-2%2F" On every single post. We're using Akismet and haven't had issues in the past....and I can't figure out the fix. I've tried turning it off and back on; I'm reluctant to completely switch commenting systems because we'd lose so much history. Anyone seen this particular re-direct love happen before? Angela
Technical SEO | | TurnerPR0 -
Wordpress Website + 404 Errors
Hi everyone, I like to do a bit of auditing for our clients using SEOMoz. Once client that's using a Wordpress website had reported over a couple hundred 404 errors. However, when checking out the links, all the webpages (that I've tested) loaded just fine. Does anyone know why this would be the case? I thought, perhaps, the website might have gone down when it was crawling, but I have no evidence to back this up.
Technical SEO | | ThinkShiftInc0 -
Too Many On Page Links Error On Wordpress Blog
I have a wordpress blog. I am getting an error message from SEOmoz "too many on page links" However SEOmoz is counting a full month of blogs as one page. For example-3 onpage internal links in each blog times 30 different blog article in a month is recorded as 90 on page links. Is there any mechanism to fix this on wordpress
Technical SEO | | wianno1680 -
Most Common Errors & Warnings
Hello there, i would like to ask some basic tips.. regarding found common errors & Warnings. list : Tittle Element Too Long
Technical SEO | | Bretly
Duplicate Page Content
and Duplicate Page Tittle. how could i fixed this one? any help would be greatly appreciated regards,0 -
404 errors on a 301'd page
I current have a site that when run though a site map tool (screaming frog or xenu) returns a 404 error on a number of pages The pages are indexed in Google and when visited they do 301 to the correct page? why would the sitemap tool be giving me a different result? is it not reading the page correctly?
Technical SEO | | EAOM0