Google is showing 404 error. What should I do?
-
Dear Experts,
Though few of my website pages are accessible, Google is showing 404 error. What should I do? Even moz reports gives me the same.
Problems:
1. Few of my Pages are not yet catched in Google. (Earlier all of them were catched by Google)
2. Tried to fetch the those pages, but Google says, page not found.
3. Included them in sitemap, the result is the same.Please advice:
Note: I have recently changed my hosting server.
-
You're welcome!
-
Everything is perfect now. The pages I mentioned are indexed now. Thank you Monica.
-
Yes rectified the problem. Accidentally our developers had included a php code on the header and we didnt notice. Finally identified and removed them.
BTW, thanks for your suggestion.
-
Hey There
Are you all set? One thing to consider is sometimes browsers see things differently then search crawlers or web crawlers. Try a header checker like http://urivalet.com/ _and make sure to test different user agents _- like Chrome, Googlebot etc. Check the response code for each user agent. Maybe your browser sees a 200 but Googlebot sees a 404.
-
If you are logged into your admin panel, the one for your website, you will see every page most of the time.
Have you no followed those pages? Did you change the URL? If you changed the URL without redirecting the old URL you will get a 404 error. Make sure that when you changed your hosting solution that the URL structure didn't change for some reason.
-
I am very sure that, the page "A" is working perfectly.
Sure, Let me try Screaming frog crawl and keep you posted on the result.
BTW, thank you so much for your time and response as well.
-
Screaming frog crawls your site "live" Moz & Google don't so it should show you any current 404 errors. the 404 is showing because the page is not there, you would 301 a 404 page to change it from a 404 to a 200 code.
IN short a 301 is to make it so a user lands on the page and rather than find nothing they find something.
Are you sure Page "A" is working and are you sure its page A that's the problem not something odd like page "A.php" etc. ?
Run screaming frog and see if that helps with finding 404's
-
Hello Pixel,
Thank you for the response. My question is, when the pages are working, why do you want me to go with either 301 or other options. I am very sure that the page are working. After changing the hosting service only I am into this problem.
For ex: I have a page named "A". And this page is working perfectly when I tried to access it. And the same file is found on the server as well. But the tools are saying the page not found. What could be the reason.
Thank you.
-
You can use Screaming frog to find the 404 pages, from there you can either 301 them into the correct pages or a very similar page to help prevent the issue. You should also create a soft 404 page this is a page that shows a message like "opps we can't find your page" and then directs users (and bots) to a similar page or a homepage so its not such a dead end.
I'm a bit confused as what you mean by "what to do" You can either fix them by putting content on them or 301 them to the correct page.
Hope that helps.
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
-
Moved company 'Help Center' from Zendesk to Intercom, got lots of 404 errors. What now?
Howdy folks, excited to be part of the Moz community after lurking for years! I'm a few weeks into my new job (Digital Marketing at Rewind) and about 10 days ago the product team moved our Help Center from Zendesk to Intercom. Apparently the import went smoothly, but it's caused one problem I'm not really sure how to go about solving: https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/*** is where all our articles used to sit https://help.rewind.io/*** is where all our articles now are So, for example, the following article has now moved as such: https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/115001902152-Can-I-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind- https://help.rewind.io/general-faqs-and-billing/frequently-asked-questions/can-i-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind This has created a bunch of broken URLs in places like our Shopify/BigCommerce app listings, in our email drips, and in external resources etc. I've played whackamole cleaning many of these up, but these old URLs are still indexed by Google – we're up to 475 Crawl Errors in Search Console over the past week, all of which are 404s. I reached out to Intercom about this to see if they had something in place to help, but they just said my "best option is tracking down old links and setting up 301 redirects for those particular addressed". Browsing the Zendesk forms turned up some relevant-ish results, with the leading recommendation being to configure javascript redirects in the Zendesk document head (thread 1, thread 2, thread 3) of individual articles. I'm comfortable setting up 301 redirects on our website, but I'm in a bit over my head in trying to determine how I could do this with content that's hosted externally and sitting on a subdomain. I have access to our Zendesk admin, so I can go in and edit stuff there, but don't have experience with javascript redirects and have read that they might not be great for such a large scale redirection. Hopefully this is enough context for someone to provide guidance on how you think I should go about fixing things (or if there's even anything for me to do) but please let me know if there's more info I can provide. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | henrycabrown1 -
Is Google Filling in Search Forms?
Hi Mozers, Is it true that Google will fill in search forms and thus generate potentially thousands of pages by itself? We have a spike in number of pages indexed and it corresponds with the time we added an advanced search form to the site... Thanks for the advice! Yael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
How to Handle a Soft 404 error to an admin page in WordPress
I'm seeing this error on Google Webmaster Console: | URL: | http://www.awlwildlife.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php | | | Error details | Linked from | | |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aj613
| Last crawled: 11/15/16First detected: 11/15/16 The target URL doesn't exist, but your server is not returning a 404 (file not found) error. Learn more Your server returns a code other than 404 or 410 for a non-existent page (or redirecting users to another page, such as the homepage, instead of returning a 404). This creates a poor experience for searchers and search engines. More information about "soft 404" errors | Any ideas what I should do about it? Thanks!0 -
My Site name changed. Why does sometimes new name, sometimes old name show in Google.
My website name has changed in the title, but only shows up sometimes in the SERPs. What can I do to ensure the new name is the name that always shows up? It's been a month since the change and we have submitted a new sitemap. Here's one example: http://www.building.govt.nz/blc-building-act. In Google (for New Zealand building code) it shows up as Building Act - Department of Building and Housing. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanielleNZ0 -
Wordpress No 404
Hello, My issue is that in wordpress 404 does not seem to be working properly. An example of this is: sitename.com/category/catname loads the files in that category but I can also type sitename.com/category/asdasfaasd/catname and it still goes to the posts in that category and does not 404. I can replace the misc text with anything and it does not 404. My worry is that this can be used to exploit duplicate content. I've looked at a couple of other sites and they do the same. I'm using Yoast as my SEO plugin and my theme is elogix from themeforest. I've tried disabling all plugins, cloudflare and changing theme and the same issue exists. If anyone can help it would be extremely appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LukeHutchinson0 -
Google Local oddity
So I spotted something a little weird... one of my client's Google Local placements in blended results has the domain name - complete with the .com extension appearing where the business name typically appears: Businessxyz.com www. businessxyz .com of Google reviews Has anyone seen this? I setup their Google Places account quite some time ago and used the business name - not the url. I also setup their Google+ and Local page - using the name. None of the page titles on the website contain the url. I simply can not pinpoint where G is pulling this from or why for that matter. All competitors are appearing with business name - only my client has the domain name visible for the particular local search query. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCW0 -
400 errors and URL parameters in Google Webmaster Tools
On our website we do a lot of dynamic resizing of images by using a script which automatically re-sizes an image dependant on paramaters in the URL like: www.mysite.com/images/1234.jpg?width=100&height=200&cut=false In webmaster tools I have noticed there are a lot of 400 errors on these image Also when I click the URL's listed as causing the errors the URL's are URL Encoded and go to pages like this (this give a bad request): www.mysite.com/images/1234.jpg?%3Fwidth%3D100%26height%3D200%26cut%3Dfalse What are your thoughts on what I should do to stop this? I notice in my webmaster tools "URL Parameters" there are parameters for:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
height
width
cut which must be from the Image URLs. These are currently set to "Let Google Decide", but should I change them manually to "Doesn't effect page content"? Thanks in advance0