404 Errors in WMT
-
Currently my website have about 10,000 404 errors for my site as wordpress is adding /feed/ to the end of all url in my website.. Should I restrict /feed/ from the robot txt?
-
Yea would have my developer look at the issue for me thank you..
-
Thanks for the info via direct message. As far as I know, those /feed/ URLs should not return 404's. I checked my site for example;
http://www.evolvingseo.com/2014/08/15/hiring-evolver-number-one/feed/ - and that returns a 200 OK.
I am not sure why WordPress would be doing this to be honest. Do you have a developer working with you? Or if it's a Theme you could contact the theme vendor about it.
-
Hi There
As mentioned above - it would be optimal to see an example - or if you can't share the site, just a generic example. It may be that wordpress is adding feed URLs where they don't need to be, so we'd need to take a good look.
-
Good morning!
Before you go cutting 10,000 404's I personally would try and address why your getting 404 errors for your RSS Feed.
Having 10,000 errors is a broad number, plenty of those could be duplicates, and some of those are probably not just related to the RSS Feed. If there is anything I have learned in SEO is that I can almost never use broad strokes when painting, and if I do, I have to be absolutely SURE what my brush is covering. A little while back Matt Cutts made a video about RSS feeds and the benefit they can have to websites. They are not as important as the blog itself, but still, it's a nice feature that you could take advantage if you already have.
The reason I bring this up; if you make the broad statement the restrict /feed/ how to you know for certain that you aren't cutting off other pages that have helped?
I don't know enough about your website to truly advise but I would take a look at all of those errors, put them into a spreadsheet and first get rid of all duplicates and pull out all of the /feed/ 404's to try and get as specific of a number as possible.
Look in your referrals in GWMT and GA and see if your RSS feed is bringing you traffic/referrals at all. If it isn't helping then I think you can put a 410 code for the /feed/ although as pointed out to me, there really isn't much benefit for using the 410 over just letting the 404s die on their own.
Hope that helps a little!
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
-
Thousands of 404-pages, duplicate content pages, temporary redirect
Hi, i take over the SEO of a quite large e-commerce-site. After checking crawl issues, there seems to be +3000 4xx client errors, +3000 duplicate content issues and +35000 temporary redirects. I'm quite desperate regarding these results. What would be the most effective way to handle that. It's a magento shop. I'm grateful for any kind of help! Thx,
Technical SEO | | posthumus
boris0 -
GWT Soft 404 count is climbing. Important to fix?
In GWT I am seeing my mobile site's soft 404 count slowly rise from 5 two weeks ago to over 100 as of today. If I do nothing I expect it will continue to rise into the thousands. This is due to there being followed links on external sites to thousands of discontinued products we used to offer. The landing page for these links simply says the product is no longer available and gives links to related areas of our site. I know I can address this by returning a 404 for these pages, but doing so will cause these pages to be de-indexed. Since these pages still have utility in redirecting people to related, available products, I want these pages to stay in the index and so I don't want to return a 404. Another way of addressing this is to add more useful content to these pages so that Google no longer classifies them as soft 404. I have images and written content for these pages that I'm not showing right now, but I could show if necessary. But before investing any time in addressing these soft 404s, does anyone know the real consequences of not addressing them? Right now I'm getting 275k pages indexed and historically crawl budget has not been an issue on my site, nor have I seen any anomalous crawl activity since the climb in soft 404s began. Unchecked, the soft 404s could climb to 20,000ish. I'm wondering if I should start expecting effects on the crawl, and also if domain authority takes a hit when there are that many soft 404s being reported. Any information is appreciated.
Technical SEO | | merch_zzounds0 -
Massive Increase in 404 Errors in GWT
Last June, we transitioned our site to the Magento platform. When we did so, we naturally got an increase in 404 errors for URLs that were not redirected (for a variety of reasons: we hadn't carried the product for years, Google no longer got the same string when it did a "search" on the site, etc.). We knew these would be there and were completely fine with them. We also got many 404s due to the way Magento had implemented their site map (putting in products that were not visible to customers, including all the different file paths to get to a product even though we use a flat structure, etc.). These were frustrating but we did custom work on the site map and let Google resolve those many, many 440s on its own. Sure enough, a few months went by and GWT started to clear out the 404s. All the poor, nonexistent links from the site map and missing links from the old site - they started disappearing from the crawl notices and we slowly went from some 20k 404s to 4k 404s. Still a lot, but we were getting there. Then, in the last 2 weeks, all of those links started showing up again in GWT and reporting as 404s. Now we have 38k 404s (way more than ever reported). I confirmed that these bad links are not showing up in our site map or anything and I'm really not sure how Google found these again. I know, in general, these 404s don't hurt our site. But it just seems so odd. Is there any chance Google bots just randomly crawled a big ol' list of outdated links it hadn't tried for awhile? And does anyone have any advice for clearing them out?
Technical SEO | | Marketing.SCG0 -
Configure a mobile site with WMT
Hello Everyone, I'm in a situation that I have no idea how to handle. I have only really dealt with RWD, and not a mobile-specific site. Anyway, I have a client who is launching an m.domian.com for their mobile site, how do I add/configure this in WMT? Thanks Zach
Technical SEO | | Zachary_Russell0 -
Should I worry about these 404's?
Just wondering what the thought was on this. We have a site that lets people generate user profiles and once they delete the profile the page then 404's. I was told there is nothing we can do about those from our developers, but I was wondering if I should worry about these...I don't think they will affect any of our rankings, but you never know so I thought I would ask. Thanks
Technical SEO | | KateGMaker1 -
Website of only circa 20 pages drawing 1,000s of errors?
Hi, One of the websites I run is getting 1,000s of errors for duplicate title / content even though there are only approximately 20 pages. SEOMoz seems to be finding pages that seem to have duplicated themselves. For example a blog page (/blog) is appearing as /blog/blog then blog/blog/blog and so on. Anyone shed some light on why this is occurring? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | TheCarnage0 -
WP Blog Errors
My WP blog is adding my email during the crawl, and I am getting 200+ errors for similar to the following; http://www.cisaz.com/blog/2010/10-reasons-why-microsofts-internet-explorer-dominance-is-ending/tony@cisaz.net "tony@cisaz.net" is added to Every post. Any ideas how I fix it? I am using Yoast Plug in. Thanks Guys!
Technical SEO | | smstv0