Odd 404 pages

[Muhammad-Isap]

Evening all,

I've performed a Screaming Frog technical crawl of a site, and it's returning links like this as 404s:

http://clientsite.co.uk/accidents-caused-by-colleagues/js/modernizr-2.0.6.min.js

Now, I recognise that Modernizr is used for detecting features in the user's browser - but why would it have created an indexed page that no longer exists?

Would you leave them as is? 410 them?  Or do something else entirely?

Thanks for reading, I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Kind regards,

John.

[Everett]

Hello John,

I wouldn't assume that modernizr actually created a page. More likely, the relative path to the minified javascript file was found by Google in your source code, and Google tried to access it. Perhaps the path was wrong (e.g. /js/ exists off the root, not within that "/accidents..." folder) so when Google tried to access that resource it could not be found.

I would leave it as-is if the URL produces a 404 status code. However, I would also find the code on that page and see whether it uses the correct path or not. You don't want to block those files, but you don't want Google wasting crawl budget on pages that don't exist either.

If you can't figure out what's causing it I would contact the folks at modernizr. You can see their Twitter profiles at the bottom of this page: http://modernizr.com/ .

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

I would check and see if this resource link needs to be updated, and if you still use it, update it in your template.

If it's no longer useful or available, remove it.

Hope this helps! Good luck!