Is my 404 page set up correctly?
-
HI there! In using a few different tools, and I have received varied result concerning my 404 page. In WebSite Auditor from Link Assistant, it says my page is set up incorrectly. My webmaster has told me that it is set up correctly, but at this point I'm not entirely sure what's what. Is there another way to test it?
I guess i'm not quite sure about the jargon and what "return 404 response code" actually means.
Thanks for your help!
-
To add to Patrick's great response, this page describes what you are seeing. When you try to go to a page on your site that does not exist, you seem to correctly get an error page.
But the content of the page does not necessarily reflect the HTTP response returned by the server. Your server is saying that the page was found, although the content of the page says it wasn't found. [A 404 response from the server simply means Not Found.]
If you look in your Google Webmaster Tools under Crawl > Crawl Errors you will see a tab called Soft 404. A soft 404 is a page that says it is not found but is not returning an actual 404, not found, response.
[I always wondered how Google could tell--I was given the answer that if Google sees that a whole bunch of different URLs bring up the same page, which does not return a 404 response, it assumes that that page says it is an error page and labels it a soft 404.]
If you want to test whether a URL on your site is correctly returning a 404, you can use Fetch as Google to see if it returns Not Found or else there are a number of free server response checkers online.
-
Hi there
Thanks! Currently, this page is returning a 200 status code, meaning that it's OK.
You need to change this status code to a 404 status code in order for it to return a 404 to crawlers.
I see your site is running on Apache - here's a resource on how to return a 404.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
Sorry about that!
-
Hi Esmee
Can you please provide a URL so we can check? Thanks so much!
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
-
Is the Moz Ranking Report correct?
Hello here, today I got my weekly report from Moz by email and it reported a strong decline of rankings on some of our major keywords. Then I went to check on Google personally, and instead I found my pages ranked much higher than reported by Moz (please note that my results wasn't personalized...). I also use a desktop program to check my rankings, and what I found personally on Google corresponded to what my desktop program reported me. Here is an example: my website is virtualsheetmusic.com, and Moz reported a rank NOT in top 50 for the following keyword: "moonlight sonata sheet music" Whereas we are actually on the 19th spot. Another example for the keyword "czardas violin sheet music", Moz reports NOT in top 50, whereas we are actually at the 5th spot on the first page of Google results! Why's this? Anyone can explain? Is there anything wrong with Moz ranking report?
Moz Pro | | fablau0 -
On Page Reports for Long-Tail Keywords?
First Q&A here, so take it easy on me. Hopefully this is not a dumb question. 99% of the on page reports I look at are for local keywords. I'm finding that some of the page reports get and F where they should be receiving A's. I noticed if I manage a long-tail keyword like "books in houston tx" that I get a grade based on the exact phrase as opposed to a combination of the keywords. So when I have text in the body saying "books in the Houston area" or "Houston Books" for example, instead of using my exact managed keyword, it will tell me that the keyword is not mentioned in the body anywhere. When it is, it's just not in the exact order... I'm trying to write my pages for users and I don't think the users want to hear "books in houston tx" several times. If I do a report on the same page for the keyword "books" I get an A. So this is where it gets a little in the grey area for me. I need a solid on page report for local long-tail search terms. Anyone have any advice? Is there a way I could be using this tool to better suit my needs?
Moz Pro | | AmericomMarketing0 -
Concerned About Individual Pages
Okay. I've setup a campaign for www.site.com and given a list of keywords. So after the initial crawl we'll have some results. What I'm looking for tho is how do individual pages on my site rank for the list of keywords given. And then be able to go to a screen in seomoz with data for that particular page with recommendations and stuff like that. Is this what's going to happen or do I need to create a campaign for each url i want to track? If all will work as I'd like in the example above, should I then add the second list of keywords that some other pages should rank for? Will it get to be a big mess or can I relate the keywords to pages in some way? It seems like what I'm looking for is what this program should be... Thanks!
Moz Pro | | martJ0 -
Duplicate page titles in SEOMoz
My on page reports are showing a good number of duplicate title tags, but they are all because of a url tracking parameter that tells us which link the visitor clicked on. For example, http://www.example.com/example-product.htm?ref=navside and http://www.example.com/example-product.htm are the same page, but are treated as to different urls in SEOMoz. This is creating "fake" number of duplicate page titles in my reports. This has not been a problem with Google, but SEOMoz is treating it like this and it's confusing my data. Is there a way to specify this as a url parameter in the Moz software? Or does anybody have another suggestion? Should I specify this in GWT and BWT?
Moz Pro | | InetAll0 -
Keyword Difficulty Tool Full Reports - Are they correct?
Hello SEOMOZ Community I hope you can answer my following question. I’ve used the Keyword Difficulty and SERPS to analyse why my competitors seem to be higher than me in the SERPS for a certain keyword. The only problem I can see when I’ve done the full report is that our website has no internal links to the page we are trying to rank for, however when I go into Google webmasters tools it’s stating we have over 99,000 links. Can you please let me know why this is showing in the report? Many Thanks Matt
Moz Pro | | Steve250 -
Crawl Disgnosis only crawling 250 pages not 10,000
My crawl diagnosis has suddenly dropped from 10,000 pages to just 250. I've been tracking and working on an ecommerce website with 102,000 pages (www.heatingreplacementparts.co.uk) and the history for this was showing some great improvements. Suddenly the CD report today is showing only 250 pages! What has happened? Not only is this frustrating to work with as I was chipping away at the errors and warnings, but also my graphs for reporting to my client are now all screwed up. I have a pro plan and nothing has (or should have!) changed.
Moz Pro | | eseyo0 -
4xx status code a page that cannot be accessed..
All the error is because the Danish letters "åøæ" in the url.. But i can access all pages, therefor the error isent a true error!!! Why is it an Issue, Google can read "øæå", why cant SEOMOZ??
Moz Pro | | seopeter290 -
Why is Roger crawling pages that are disallowed in my robots.txt file?
I have specified the following in my robots.txt file: Disallow: /catalog/product_compare/ Yet Roger is crawling these pages = 1,357 errors. Is this a bug or am I missing something in my robots.txt file? Here's one of the URLs that Roger pulled: <colgroup><col width="312"></colgroup>
Moz Pro | | MeltButterySpread
| example.com/catalog/product_compare/add/product/19241/uenc/aHR0cDovL2ZyZXNocHJvZHVjZWNsb3RoZXMuY29tL3RvcHMvYWxsLXRvcHM_cD02/ Please let me know if my problem is in robots.txt or if Roger spaced this one. Thanks! |0