Wordpress 404 Errors
-
Hi Guys,
One of my clients is scratching his head after a site migration. He has moved to wordpress and now GWT is creating weird and wonderful strange 404 errors. For example
http://www.allsee-tech.com/digital-signage-blog/category/clients.html
There are loads like the above which seem to be made up out of his blog and navigation http://www.allsee-tech.com/clients.html works!
Any ideas? Is it a rogue plugin? How do we fix?
Kind Regards
Neil
-
I just looked at the site and it doesn't appear to be on Wordpress. Is it on wordpress right now?
Is that site on Wordpress?
-
http://www.allsee-tech.com/digital-signage-blog/category/clients.html
This is a category archive page. Denoted by /category/clients (ignore the extension).
I would go in to the categories of your blog and see if there is a clients category. If you don't want it, then remove the category. It appears your other archives are working fine. It's most likely an erroneous plugin that is reporting a sitemap to Google. You can go in to GWT and review any sitemaps reported on your behalf. If there is none, then it's not a plugin but one of two other possibilities. WP has a ping setting inside of the admin dashboard. It is probably set to ping a ping syndicator like pingomatic which is pinging google ( https://wordpress.org/support/topic/google-blog-pinging ). At some point you had a category with a post in it in that category and google was pinged and found a 404. If this is the case it will go away. The last possibility is that somewhere either externally or internally there is a link to that url and google is indexing it. If that is the case you are going to have to 301 it to a legit location.
-
Hi Neil
Has this been now resolved? I've tried crawling the site a whole bunch of ways and am not turning up any 404s at all. It's also possible the errors in webmaster tools were old. Did you try "marking as fixed" and see if they come back?
-
It looks like it is spinning off 404s based on your main site's html pages (which is not in wordpress right?) which makes it look like not so much a wordpress problem as a linking problem. The blog is using relative urls (like this: ../../../../../clients.html) in its header and footer links back to the main site. This can potentially cause problems and even though in a browser the links all seem to be working fine the 404 you mention looks like it could be created by this setup. I would put absolute urls in the main menu and footer links and see if that clears up the 404s.
-
Adding to Hutch 24 I have fund that all in 1 seo plugin by Michael Torbert is very powerful plugin which could be of assistance
-
I would recommend getting Yoast SEO for Wordpress, then in the Yoast options for XML sitemap under taxonomies tell it to exclude Categories. Most likely after the migration somewhere an option that creates or references pages based on categories and/or tags was left on. You can simple exclude these pages from your sitemap while you check your other plug-ins and settings to make sure that one of them is not trying to reference these pages which have been turned off.
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
-
My 404 page is returning a 404
Hi there, Moz has highlighted that my 404 page is returning a 404... Looking at webmaster tools within crawl errors, it's the same story. The only big change on the website is that we recently moved to https for the entire site, so all pages have a 301 to the corresponding https page, including the old 404 http page. I don't know if that makes any difference? Any help or advice on how I reasolve this will be much appreciated. Thanks, Stuart
Technical SEO | | Stuart260 -
Best strategy to handle over 100,000 404 errors.
I recently been given a site that has over one-hundred thousand 404 error codes listed in Google Webmasters. It is really odd because according to Google Webmasters, the pages that are linking to these 404 pages are also pages that no longer exist (they are 404 pages themselves). These errors were a result of site migration that had occurred. Appreciate any input on how one might go about auditing and repairing large amounts of 404 errors. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | SEO_Promenade0 -
Wordpress BackupBuddy adding ?doing_wp_cron= in URLS
Hi Has anyone found WordPress Backup Buddy causing a problem with SEO. I understand why it does it, but wondered if anyone experienced issues with this? Only sometimes it adds /?doing_wp_cron=****** on to the end of a URL Thanks Tom
Technical SEO | | TomPryor831 -
Odd URL errors upon crawl
Hi, I see this in Google Webmasters, and am now also seeing it here...when a crawl is performed on my site, I get many 500 server error codes for URLs that I don't believe exist. It's as if it sees a normal URL but adds this to it: %3Cdiv%20id= It's like this for hundreds of URLs. Good URL that actually exists http://www.ffr-dsi.com/food-retailing/supplies/ URL that causes error and I have no idea why http://www.ffr-dsi.com/food-retailing/supplies/%3Cdiv%20id= Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Matt10 -
Is there a way of changing the Permalink without getting the 404 Error?
Hi, I am new to this all.. Is there a way of changing the permalink for example from: domain/content/ to domain/profile/ without receiving the 404 error message. It's just that since my website has been developed, some pages and their content have changed but the permalink still shows the name of the old page which may be confusing. Ps. Please use most simple language for explanations as I am really new to it. Thank you! Ve
Technical SEO | | MissVe0 -
Wordpress Category Archives
Wordpress question here. Can anyone tell me if there is an SEO advantage to creating a page filtered to show results from an individual category as opposed to simply linking to the category archive? The content is identical in both cases.
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
Link API returns Error 500
http://lsapi.seomoz.com/linkscape/links/nz.yahoo.com?SourceCols=4&Limit=100&Sort=domain_authority&Scope=domain_to_domain&Filter=external+follow&LinkCols=4 Hi folks any idea why the above returns Err 500 ? Seems to pertain to the domain - it works on other sites just not nz.yahoo.com Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jimbo_kemp0 -
What should be noindexed on a Wordpress blog?
I know this can be a "it depends" answer so I'll try to explain. Qualifications on your answers would be great. I use the Wordpress architecture for myself and clients on sites and blogs. Almost every business site we create has a blog and I'm always working to improve results on them. My strategy has been the following: Categories: General, main content types, general keywords. Index, follow Tags: Very specific, post specific, may only be used once for one post. My categories have descriptions that are displayed on the category pages with excerpts. Tags rarely have a description but are displayed with excerpts on the page. My idea has been to index the categories to crawl the content and they have unique content by showing the category description. Tags shouldn't be archived because they may be all over the place and may have only 1 post with no tag description. I'm trying to reduce duplicate content but I don't want to limit results for my clients and myself. Should I set tags to noindex, follow or should I have them indexed? The only thing I'm thinking with having the tags indexed is that I may be able to get additional traffic through the more specific tags (i.e. tag = meta tags, category = SEO).
Technical SEO | | JaredDetroit0