Wordpress 404 Errors

[nezona]

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

[AFW1179]

I just looked at the site and it doesn't appear to be on Wordpress. Is it on wordpress right now?

http://www.allsee-tech.com/

Is that site on Wordpress?

[AFW1179]

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.

[evolvingSEO]

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?

[LynnPatchett]

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.

[dynamyt100]

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

[Hutch42]

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.