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
-
Does product environment have impact on main website's SEO
We have two environments - product, where login is necessary and where the customers are working. We also have there our help desk, Q&A and knowledge base. Pretty sophisticated page regarding information on a specific topic. We also have our main page where we promote our products, company and events, etc. Main page is www.example.com, where product environment is login.example.com . Does this product environment have an impact on my main page's SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NeringaA0 -
What's more valuable, a Blog or a Forum, and how to integrate?
We want to start a blog or forum (maybe eventually both) and are unsure what is the best way to publish it from an SEO standpoint. If the blog is published on our domain, like domain.com/blog then that obviously helps the site but if the base site is a for-profit business wouldn't it get less credibility, eyeballs, links as opposed to if you started the blog as it's own separate community on a separate domain and then just strategically linked to the for profit site (sponsorship links)? Essentially the question is, if I'm the Lucky Soday Company, do I start a Blog on the Lucky Soda website, or do I start a separate website to grow a soft drink enthusiast community blog / forum? I would guess a blog has more SEO potential than a discussion forum?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MrSem0 -
What can cause for a service page to rank in Google's Answer Box?
Hello Everyone, Have recently seen a Google result for "vps hosting" showing service page details in Answer Box. I would really like to know, what can cause a service page to appear in the Answer Box? Have attached a screenshot of result page. CaRiWtQUcAALn9n.png CaRiWtQUcAALn9n.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eukmark0 -
Duplicate Content through 'Gclid'
Hello, We've had the known problem of duplicate content through the gclid parameter caused by Google Adwords. As per Google's recommendation - we added the canonical tag to every page on our site so when the bot came to each page they would go 'Ah-ha, this is the original page'. We also added the paramter to the URL parameters in Google Wemaster Tools. However, now it seems as though a canonical is automatically been given to these newly created gclid pages; below https://www.google.com.au/search?espv=2&q=site%3Awww.mypetwarehouse.com.au+inurl%3Agclid&oq=site%3A&gs_l=serp.3.0.35i39l2j0i67l4j0i10j0i67j0j0i131.58677.61871.0.63823.11.8.3.0.0.0.208.930.0j3j2.5.0....0...1c.1.64.serp..8.3.419.nUJod6dYZmI Therefore these new pages are now being indexed, causing duplicate content. Does anyone have any idea about what to do in this situation? Thanks, Stephen.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyPetWarehouse0 -
404's - Do they impact search ranking/how do we get rid of them?
Hi, We recently ran the Moz website crawl report and saw a number of 404 pages from our site come back. These were returned as "high priority" issues to fix. My question is, how do 404's impact search ranking? From what Google support tells me, 404's are "normal" and not a big deal to fix, but if they are "high priority" shouldn't we be doing something to remove them? Also, if I do want to remove the pages, how would I go about doing so? Is it enough to go into Webmaster tools and list it as a link no to crawl anymore or do we need to do work from the website development side as well? Here are a couple of examples that came back..these are articles that were previously posted but we decided to close out: http://loyalty360.org/loyalty-management/september-2011/let-me-guessyour-loyalty-program-isnt-working http://loyalty360.org/resources/article/mark-johnson-speaks-at-motivation-show Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | carlystemmer0 -
Duplicate content URLs from bespoke ecommerce CMS - what's the best solution here?
Hi Mozzers Just noticed this pattern on a retail website... This URL product.php?cat=5 is also churning out products.php?cat=5&sub_cat= (same content as product.php?cat=5 but from this different URL - this is a blank subcat - there are also unique subcat pages with unique content - but this one is blank) How should I deal with that? and then I'm seeing: product-detail.php?a_id=NT001RKS0000000 and product-detail.php?a_id=NT001RKS0000000&cont_ref=giftselector (same content as product-detail.php?a_id=NT001RKS0000000 but from this different URL) How should I deal with that? This is a bespoke ecommerce CMS (unfortunately). Any pointers would be great 🙂 Best wishes, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Will blocking google and SE's from indexing images hurt SEO?
Hi, We have a bit of a problem where on a website we are managing, there are thousands of "Dynamically" re-sized images. These are stressing out the server as on any page there could be upto 100 dynamically re-sized images. Google alone is indexing 50,000 pages a day, so multiply that by the number of images and it is a huge drag on the server. I was wondering if it maybe an idea to blog Robots (in robots.txt) from indexing all the images in the image file, to reduce the server load until we have a proper fix in place. We don't get any real value from having our website images in "Google Images" so I am wondering if this could be a safe way of reducing server load? Are there any other potential SEO issues this could cause?? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770 -
Questions regarding Google's "improved url handling parameters"
Google recently posted about improving url handling parameters http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/07/improved-handling-of-urls-with.html I have a couple questions: Is it better to canonicalize urls or use parameter handling? Will Google inform us if it finds a parameter issue? Or, should we have a prepare a list of parameters that should be addressed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0