Sitemap issue? 404's & 500's are regenerating?
-
I am using the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast to generate a sitemap on http://www.atozqualityfencing.com. Last month, I had an associate create redirects for over 200 404 errors. She did this via the .htaccess file. Today, there are the same amount of 404s along with a number of 503 errors. This new Wordpress website was constructed on a subdirectory and made live by simply entering some code into the .htaccess file in order to direct browsers to the content we wanted live. In other words, the content actually resides in a subdirectory titled "newsite" but is shown live on the main url.
Can you tell me why we are having these 404 & 503 errors? I have no idea where to begin looking.
-
You likely have a .htaccess issue causing a rewrite error. You may want to examine or replace your .htaccess with a default. Also, I've seen some plugins cause this error.
What is happening is this:
http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/newsite
is sent to:
http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/newsite/
Note the trailing slash.
But that page is returning a 404 error.
If I go to
http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/newsite/index.php it redirects to
http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/newsite/
So there is likely something wrong in the redirect rules. I would try disabling all plugins. If that fails, compare the current htaccess to a default one and remove any modifications.
.
-
Wondering if anyone else out there has some insight as to whether the information in my previous post seems to be correct.
-
Oye, Jeff - this is a little bit over my head so bear with me as I work it through.
I went to redbot.org and entered the url of where the main website is actually living (http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/newsite). I received this information:
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Date: Sun, 24 Aug 2014 14:56:10 GMT Server: Apache Location: [http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/newsite/](https://redbot.org/?uri=http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/newsite/&req_hdr=Referer%3Ahttp://www.atozqualityfencing.com/newsite) Cache-Control: max-age=3600 Expires: Sun, 24 Aug 2014 15:56:10 GMT Content-Length: 326 Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 When I clicked on the url listed under Location above, I receive the following information:
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found Date: Sun, 24 Aug 2014 14:59:59 GMT Server: Apache X-Pingback: http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/newsite/xmlrpc.php Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0 Pragma: no-cache Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
This has me confused and I wondering if the method used for making the revised website is either not good or is missing something. Here are the articles that were followed for "moving" the newsite redesign to the live url. ``` [http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory](http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory) [http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress#When_Your_Domain_Name_or_URLs_Change](http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress#When_Your_Domain_Name_or_URLs_Change) ``` Can you provide any further assistance? Thanks, Janet ```
-
A 503 error is a service unavailable error. I have seen situations where redirects are incorrect and loop. Depending on the hosting setup, this can trigger various HTTP error codes.
The best way to debug this is by looking at your Apache access logs. Scan your logs for the 503 errors. Pay attention to the URL being requested as well as the referring URL.
Very likely, there's some looping process and in cases when Apache runs on FastCGI, you can get a 503 error due to too many processes being triggered.
Also, due to how WP handles 404's, I've seen many plugins mask underlying causes. So if you have any plugins that impact error handling, you may need to remove those while debugging.
You can also use http://www.redbot.org/ to check the headers for any page that should be redirected. That tool should return a Location header with a URL. Visit that Location URL in your browser and make sure it resolves.
The goal here is to try to replicate the behavior. Once you can replicate the behavior, dig into your redirect/rewrite rules and examine the logic to determine why you are seeing the loops or failures.
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
-
Would a Search Engine treat a sitemap hosted in the cloud in the same way as if it was simply on /sitemap.htm?
Mainly to allow updates without the need for publishing - would Google interpret any differently? Thanks
Technical SEO | | RichCMF0 -
My 'complete guide' is cannibalising my main product page and hurting rankings
Hi everyone, I have a main page for my blepharoplasty surgical product that I want to rank. It's a pretty in-depth summary for patients to read all about the treatment and look at before and after pictures and there's calls to action in there. It works great and is getting lots of conversions. But I also have a 'complete guide' PDF which is for patients who are really interested in discovering all the technicalities of their eye-lift procedure including medical research, clinical stuff and risks. Now my main page is at position 4 and the complete guide is right below it in 5. So I tried to consolidate by adding the complete guide as a download on the main page. I've looked into rel canonical but don't think it's appropriate here as they are not technically 'duplicates' because they serve different purposes. Then I thought of adding a meta noindex but was not sure whether this was the right thing to do either. My report doesn't get any clicks from the serps, people visit it from the main page. I saw in Wordpress that there's options for the link, one says 'link to media file', 'custom URL' and 'attachment'. I've got the custom URL selected at the moment. There's also a box for 'link rel' which i figure is where I'd put the noindex. If that's the right thing to do, what should go in that box? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Smileworks_Liverpool0 -
Disallowing WP 'author' page archives
Hey Mozzers. I want to block my author archive pages, but not the primary page of each author. For example, I want to keep /author/jbentz/ but get rid of /author/jbentz/page/4/. Can I do that in robots by using a * where the author name would be populated. ' So, basically... my robots file would include something like this... Disallow: /author/*/page/ Will this work for my intended goal... or will this just disallow all of my author pages?
Technical SEO | | Netrepid0 -
My blog post for a specific keyword is in the 'omitted results'. Why might this be, and how to overcome it?
My website Homepage: http://kulraj.org Here is the page I am working to rank for:** http://kulraj.org/2014/07/15/hedonic-treadmill/** When I search specifically for 'kulraj hedonic treadmill' just to test it, the first result is this: kulraj.org_/tag/_hedonic-treadmill. It shows the shortened version of the article that is within the Tag page. [I'm new to SEO and Moz, please keep in mind] Moz has told me I have duplicate content, which is regarding my main Blog page and Tags page, which is true the content is duplicate. However, the actual blog post itself is not displayed anywhere else on the website, or anywhere else on the web. Moz confirms this, and reports no duplicate content warning. My questions, therefore, are: 1. How do I actually go about installing a rel canonical tag within a standard WordPress dashboard (I'm using Genesis Framework) - I'm finding great difficulty finding instructions on this anywhere on the web. I clearly need to fix the issue with Blog page and Tags Page. 2. Why would my blog post be omitted, and are there any suggestions I could implement to bring it into the main search results. Other things I've noticed: 1. If I type this URL in: kulraj.org/hedonic-treadmill, it automatically redirects to http://kulraj.org/2014/07/15/hedonic-treadmill/ 2. Inside Google Webmaster Tools it says: No new messages or recent critical issues. 3. Regarding the above, when I click 'Labs > author stats' within Webmaster Tools, it shows nil stats, so something there is not quite right either, even though Google+ Authorship is confirmed.
Technical SEO | | Kulraj0 -
Sitemap issue - Tons of 404 errors
We've recreated a client site in a subdirectory (mysite.com/newsite) of his domain and when it was ready to go live, added code to the htaccess file in order to display the revamped website on the main url. These are the directions that were followed to do this: http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory and http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress#When_Your_Domain_Name_or_URLs_Change. This has worked perfectly except that we are now receiving a lot of 404 errors am I'm wondering if this isn't the root of our evil. This is a WordPress self-hosted website and we are actively using the WordPress SEO plugin that creates multiple folders with only 50 links in each. The sitemap_index.xml file tests well in Google Analytics but is pulling a number of links from the subdirectory folder. I'm wondering if it really is the manner in which we made the site live that is our issue or if there is another problem that I cannot see yet. What is the best way to attack this issue? Any clues? The site in question is www.atozqualityfencing.com https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/
Technical SEO | | JanetJ0 -
Should you change Temporary redirects 302's to a 301 even if page is not important/intended for ranking ?
Hi Whilst i appreciate its best practice to 301 redirect permanently moved pages, what if the page is say a login page or other page you not really interested in ranking or transferring juice to ? is it still important/best practice to do so simply because the page has permanently moved hence should still be a 301 even though you don't really want it to rank ? cheers dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence1 -
Can the Hosting location of image files have a negative effect if 'off-site' such as on the devs own media server ?
Hi Can the Hosting location of image files have a negative effect if 'off-site' such as if they are on the developers own media server ? As opposed to on the actual websites server or file structure ? In the case i'm looking at the image files are hosted on a totally separate server (a media subdomain of the developers site server) from the subject sites dedicated server. Will engines still attribute the properties of files hosted in this manner to the main website (such as file name, alt attributes, etc etc) ? Or should they really be on the subject sites server own media folder ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
When do you use 'Fetch as a Google'' on Google Webmaster?
Hi, I was wondering when and how often do you use 'Fetch as a Google'' on Google Webmaster and do you submit individual pages or main URL only? I've googled it but i got confused more. I appreciate if you could help. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Rubix1