Mystery 404's
-
I have a large number of 404's that all have a similar structure: www.kempruge.com/example/kemprugelaw. kemprugelaw keeps getting stuck on the end of url's. While I created www.kempruge.com/example/ I never created the www.kempruge.com/example/kemprugelaw page or edited permalinks to have kemprugelaw at the end of the url. Any idea how this happens? And what I can do to make it stop?
Thanks,
Ruben
-
One by one is fine with me. I'd much prefer that to screwing up the site.
Thanks again,
Ruben
-
Hi Ruben
I'm glad that has helped you
There is one way you could do multiple updates BUT I would not recommend it as doing it wrong could screw up your site. You could do it via the control panel in your site's hosting by querying your MySQL database via PHPMyAdmin and doing a bulk search and update for all references to www.kempruge.com where it doesn't have http:// in front and replacing www.kemruge.com with http://www.kempruge.com.
Although it is a pain I know, the best way is to fix the errors one by one in the pages themselves and leave the redirects running until you are sure that Google, Bing and Yahoo have updated their indexes, then you can remove them.
If you copy http:// onto your Mac/PC clipboard, then it will make it quicker to open the link dialog and paste at the start of the URL.
Peter
-
Peter,
You're a genius! I'm almost certain that's it, because I can't remember adding "http://" Is there a way to get rid of those pages? I just 301 redirected them to where they are supposed to go, but I have a lot of redirects. When I say a lot, I mean a lot relative to how many pages I have. We have 500 something indexed pages, and probably 200 something redirects. I know that many redirects slows our site down. I'd like to know if there's any better option that the 301s, if I can't just delete them.
Thanks,
Ruben
-
Hi Ruben
You mentioned: In GWT, the 404s are slightly different. They are www.kempruge.com/example/www.kempruge.com
I have seen this type of thing before, or something similar, when an absolute link has been entered into some anchor text or by itself without adding http:// before the link.
So the link has been entered as www.mydomain.com - which causes the error - but it should be entered as http://www.mydomain.com
Your issue may be something completely different, but I thought I would post this as a possible solution.
Peter
-
In GWT, the 404s are slightly different. They are www.kempruge.com/example/www.kempruge.com
In BWT, it's the www.kempruge.com/example/kemprugelaw
In GWT, they say the 404's are coming from my site, but I couldn't find out where it says that for BWT.
Any thoughts, and thanks for helping out. This has been bothering me for awhile.
Ruben
-
It says it in Webmaster Tools, does that matter? I'm going to check on where from now. Also, I know my sitemap 404's, but I can't figure out what happened. If you go here: http://www.kempruge.com/category/news/feed/ that's my sitemap. How it got changed to that, I have no idea. Plus, I can't find that page in the backend of WP to change the url back to the old one.
I tried redirecting the proper sitemap name to the one that works, but that didn't seem to work.
-
I crawled your site and didn't see the 404 errors.
I did notice that your sitemap in your robots.txt 404's so you may want to take a look at that.
-
Are you seeing these 404s in Webmaster Tools or when crawling the site?
If WMT where does it say the 404 is linked to from? Click on the URL with the 404 error in WMT and select the "Linked from" tab.
Crawl the site with Screaming Frog and your user agent set to Googlebot. See if the same 404 errors are being picked up and if so, you can click on them and select the "In Links" tab to see what page the 404 is being picked up on.
I checked the source code of some of the pages on www.kempruge.com and didn't see any relative links which usually create problems like this. My bet is on a site scraping your site and creating 404 errors when they link back to your site.
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
-
Has Anyone Encountered This Old Meta Tag and Know It's Past Function?
name="url" content="http://www.mysite.com/"> I've never personally seen it used until I saw a site using it this past weekend...I cannot find any old documentation on the purpose if this tag either.Any insights or direction would truly appreciated!Many thanks, T 😎
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | talexanderyano0 -
Google's 'related:' operator
I have a quick question about Google's 'related:' operator when viewing search results. Is there reason why a website doesn't produce related/similar sites? For example, if I use the related: operator for my site, no results appear.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ecomteam_handiramp.com
https://www.google.com/#q=related:www.handiramp.com The site has been around since 1998. The site also has two good relevant DMOZ inbound links. Any suggestions on why this is and any way to fix it? Thank you.0 -
Website Isn't Ranking & I'm Not Sure Why Based On The Data
Hi Moz Community,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ErrickG
I am having an issue that has been killing me for some time and I could really use another opinion. One of my client’s websites hasn't been ranking for some time and I can't put my finger on it. There are no issues showing up in the webmaster tools. If you compare the site with the tops ranking sites for the websites number one keyword, the website is just as good as everyone else. My clients website is the first one on the left in the attachment. We have better quality content but instead of showing up on page 1,2,3 the site is on page 21. I am just at a lost. Anyone have any thoughts outside looking in. Thanks,
Errick rrLJZ2G0 -
Site's disappearnce in web rankings
I'm currently doing some work on a website: http://www.abetterdriveway.com.au. Upon starting, I detected a lot of spammy links going to this website and sort to remove them before submitting a disavow report. A few months later, this site completely disappeared in the rankings, with all keywords suddenly not ranked. I realised that the test website (which was put up to view before the new site went live) was still up on another URL and Google was suddenly ranking that site instead. Hence, I ensured that test site was completely removed. 3 weeks later however, the site (www.abetterdriveway.com.au) still remains unranked for its keywords. Upon checking Web Master Tools, I cannot see anything that stands out. There is no manual action or crawling issues that I can detect. Would anyone know the reason for this persistent disappearance? Is it something I will just have to wait out until ranking results come back, or is there something I am missing? Help here would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Not alt tags but Title and description Meta: My designer's answer.
Hello! I was busy doing lots of key wording for my images which I hate and notices that when viewed in source code, the different places I inputed information translated into Title and Description meta tags but NO alt tags. As I'm a a photographer, it's really important to me that I make the most of my images to get increased traffic so I challenged the people behind my website about it. This is their response to the question: "We all know how important the alt tags are for image SEO so why does
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IoanSaid
the design allows Title, Description and Keyword image tags but not alt
tags?" Unfortunately, there is no way to add an alt tag and title tag specifically to an image display page. However, as you have pointed out here, we use other elements that essentially accomplish the same thing. Each image display page does have its own page title and meta description, as you have also noticed. For the title, we use the IPTC Headline field (if there is no headline, then we use IPTC Title, and if there is no title, then we go to file name), and for the meta description, we use both the IPTC caption as well as the keywords - so all of that information is embedded on the image display page with the image itself and search engines can index this content. Alt Text data intends to given contextual information to search engines when they crawl your site, and the IPTC metadata that shows along with your images, does this as well." What is your opinion on that answer?0 -
.GOV Link - same impact on my site's rankings whether link to home or Gov related category?
I own a job site and I am about to get a link from a .GOV. My site has a category called "State Jobs". Should I ask the ".Gov" to link to my homepage or to the state job page and use the anchor text "State Jobs". I understand "State Jobs" page would get a big kick by that being the anchor text and linking to that specific page, but the question I have is this: for my site as a whole (homepage and various categories) would they get around the same "push up" whether the linking is to 1) my homepage with anchor text being my site's name or 2) to the state job specific page and in this case the anchor text would be "State Jobs"? thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0 -
Solving a Mystery
I've been banging my head trying to solve a mystery for a few months, with little luck. Maybe one of you has an answer. My home page organic SERP rankings have dropped from #1 or #2 late last year, to between #8 and #25 a few months ago for a couple of important keywords. I did not make any on-page changes during this period. Meanwhile, many inner pages continue to rank well (top 5) for long-tail keywords. All of my SEO is white hat, no unusual on-page tactics, no purchased or otherwise fishy backlinks. In fact, looking closely at the on-page and backlink tactics of some of the websites that have leapfrogged ahead of me, I'd say some of them have (and continue to) engaged in shady practices. No errors reported by SEOmoz. I've been judiciously applying canonical tags and other techniques to ensure minimal duplicate content. I've not received a letter from Google warning me of any unnatural backlink profiles. The biggest part of the mystery is that it seems like my home page was the only page really affected. As mentioned above, the inner pages continue to rank well for their respective keywords. Thus, I don't think I've been hit by any kind of site-wide penalty. Also, I continue to rank well on Bing/Yahoo. Does anybody have an insight into what could have happened? Has anybody else experienced anything similar (home page dropping rank while other pages stay put)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ahirai0 -
Can you see the 'indexing rules' that are in place for your own site?
By 'index rules' I mean the stipulations that constitute whether or not a given page will be indexed. If you can see them - how?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Visually0