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
-
Redirect chain error free htaccess code for website
i want to redirect domain, example.com to https://www.example.com, is anyone can help me to provide redirect chain error free ht-access code. I implemented this htaccess code on the website and mhy site show on the moz redirect chain error RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !=""
Technical SEO | | truehab
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]+\s//+(.)\sHTTP/[0-9.]+$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]+\s(./)/+\sHTTP/[0-9.]+$
RewriteRule .* http://%{HTTP_HOST}/%1 [R=301,L]0 -
Missing xml tag error
Our xml sitemap is divided up in to many smaller xml sitemaps so we have fewer products per sitemap, in order to easily identify errors. A couple of weeks ago, we changed our xml sitemap by reordering some of the products. However, this has left some old xml sitemaps without any data, and they are no longer appearing in our xml sitemap. But, Google is still identifying these sitemaps since they once existed, and they are giving errors since they can't locate them. Should we 404 those xml sitemaps, or is there a better way to handle this?
Technical SEO | | ang0 -
Error in how URLs were set up, how can it be fixed?
Hi, I managed a website port to a WP responsive deisgn for a client, see http://chicagotelephony.com. Unfortunately, he wanted me to work with a graphic designer rather than a web geek, so the resulting website has messed up URLS, i.e. index.php is smack in the middle of almost all the pages. I know that is all wrong, but I also realized that she was not fluent in the way the Genesis framework was set up or how the particular template I selected, operated. So I just wanted to get it out there.... and now it is live, but has all these errors. Do I have to do 301 redirects? Is there a setting or a button inside of the WP template that would put correct slugs but get rid of the index.pho within the URL? For example, http://chicagotelephony.com/index.php/cloud-based-solutions/ and http://chicagotelephony.com/index.php/var-network-value-added-reseller/ should be chicagotelephony.com/cloud-based-solutions/ and chicagotelephony.com/var-netowrk-value-added-reselle/ and so forth.
Technical SEO | | DianeDP0 -
Rel="publisher" validation error in html5
Using HTML5 I am getting a validation error on in my HTML Validation error: Bad value publisher for attribute rel on element link: Not an absolute IRI. The string publisher is not a registered keyword or absolute URL. This just started showing up on Tuesday in validation errors. Never showed up in the past. Has something changed?
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Noticed a lot of duplicate content errors...
how do I fix duplicate content errors on categories and tags? I am trying to get rid of all the duplicate content and I'm really not sure how to. Any suggestions, advice and/or help on this would be greatly appreciated. I did add the canonical url through the SEO Yoast plugin, but I am still seeing errors. I did this on over 200 pages. Thanks for any assistance in advance. Jaime
Technical SEO | | slapshotstudio0 -
HTTP 500 Internal Server Error, Need help
Hi, For a few days know google crawlers have been getting 500 errors from our dedicated server whenever they try to crawl the site. Using the "Fetch as Google" tool under health in webmaster tools, I get "Unreachable page" every time I fetch the homepage. Here is exactly what the google crawler is getting: <code>HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2013 19:52:27 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS) X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.3 X-Pingback: [http://www.communityadvocate.com/xmlrpc.php](http://www.communityadvocate.com/xmlrpc.php) Connection: close Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> My url is [http://www.communityadvocate.com](http://www.communityadvocate.com/)</code> and here's the screenshot from Goolge webmater http://screencast.com/t/FoWvqRRtmoEQ How can i fix that? Thank you
Technical SEO | | Vmezoz0 -
Pagination/Crawl Errors
Hi, Ive only just joined SEO moz and after they crawled my site they came up with 3600 crawl errors mostly being duplicate content and duplicate urls. After researching this it soon became clear it was due to on page pagination and after speaking with Abe from SEO mozhe advised me to take action by getting our developers to implement rel=”next” & rel=”prev” to review. soon after our developers implemented this code ( I have no understanding of this what so ever) 90% of my keywords I had been ranking for in the top 10 have dropped out the top 50! Can anyone explain this or help me with this? Thanks Andy
Technical SEO | | beck3980 -
Fixing Missing MetaTag Errors
Hey all, I just had a crawl test done on my site(created using wordpress) and I received a ton of missing meta tag descriptions to fix. The odd thing is though I use "All in One" SEO Tool and the actual pages or posts on the site do have meta tag descriptions, however I noticed for every post an RSS Feed is being automatically generated and this Feed is the link missing the meta tag descriptions. Most of the errors display "Comments on" with a /feed in the end of the url. I am totally clueless on how to resolve these errors as I havent installed any WP plugins that generate feeds automatically. Has anyone encountered this problem before or know how to fix this?? The site url is http:// GovernmentGrantsAustralia . org I have left spaces above to avoid being a link dropper 🙂 Would really appreciate if anyone can help! FYI: I just found this link after digging through all the Q&A history, however I tried it and am not sure if it has worked as I still see the errors on my SEOmoz report. The link is:
Technical SEO | | justin99
http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/41413/wordpress-missing-meta-description-tag-comments Hope someone can help me figure this one out! Thanks, Justin0