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    4. Weird 404 URL Problem - domain name being placed at end of urls

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    Weird 404 URL Problem - domain name being placed at end of urls

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
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    • Jay328
      Jay328 last edited by

      Hey there.

      For some reason when doing crawl tests I'm finding pages with the domain name being tacked on the end and causing 404 errors. 
      For example:  http://domainname.com/page-name/http://domainname.com

      This is happening to all pages, posts and even category type

      1. Site is in Wordpress
      2. Using Yoast SEO plugin

      Any suggestions?

      Thanks!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Food-Garden
        Food-Garden @Jay328 last edited by

        Hey Jay,

        Can you tell me, how you found the incorrect html? I am having the exact same problem, as you did back then, but I don't know where to look. I am having two sites, both Wordpress and build over the same theme, but one has a lot of 404 errors according to Moz and Webmastertools. The other one doesn't.

        It's it driving me crazy!

        Thanks!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • AndrewAtMGXCopy
          AndrewAtMGXCopy @Jay328 last edited by

          grats!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Jay328
            Jay328 last edited by

            I found the main culprit!   There was a sitewide link in the footer that had incorrect html formatting.  Instead of http://domainname.com, it was incorrectly inserted as domainname.com.

            Thanks for the help!

            AndrewAtMGXCopy Food-Garden 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • MikeRoberts
              MikeRoberts @Jay328 last edited by

              I had this problem in Wordpress about a year ago. In my case it was caused by links being entered into posts getting turned into relative links instead of being absolute links. Somehow this was causing the links to append the domain name to the end of the url. In our case it turned out to be an incompatibility between plugins. Have you tested all your plugins to see if any of them are interfering and causing this issue?

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • KeriMorgret
                KeriMorgret @Jay328 last edited by

                It's often an internal link that's a bit screwed up that will cause this to happen. Look for a missing colon in http:, or something like that.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • Jay328
                  Jay328 last edited by

                  I've run the crawl tests in Screaming Frog and Moz. Webmaster tools is finding these errors as well.  The sitemap is clean and void of these URLS which is strange.

                  Just to clarify- All the old urls are fine such as http://domainname.com/page-name .  They've all been duplicated with http://domainname.com/page-name/http://domainname

                  KeriMorgret MikeRoberts 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • AndrewAtMGXCopy
                    AndrewAtMGXCopy last edited by

                    Hey Jay —

                    Where're you doing these crawl tests? Does Google Webmaster and Moz both show these errors?

                    Also, is there a remote chance something is wrong in the sitemap.xml?

                    — Andrew

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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