404 Error Complications
-
Hello Moz World!
I am receiving a 404 error on one of my webpages. When I directly input the URL into my search bar I receive a 404 error. However, when I am on my website and link over to the broken webpage from my website I do not receive an error. The page will show up with no issues, and the address in the URL is the address that is receiving the 404 error. i.e. www.mywebsite.com/services
Does anyone know how i should go about troubleshooting this issue? Any suggestions on how I can resolve this? To me, I would think that if the link is not broken when being directed from the website, it shouldn't be broken when entering the url directly into the search bar. Right?
Any info/advice is appreciated.
B/R
Will
-
AHA! I had a feeling is was something like that. Glad to help!
-
Hello Logan,
Thank you for the response. The URI Valet Tool was helpful. I found my error. In all instances except for one I had; www.mywebsite.com/My-Awesome-Services.html and one instance of www.mywebsite.com/my-awesome-services.html.
I did not realize how important consistency is when it comes to capitalization in a website's URL, Lesson learned. Thanks Again Logan!
B/R
Will H.
-
Hi Will,
It's hard to say without seeing exactly what the format of the broken and working URL is. When you click the link and you get the working URL, do you take that exact URL when entering directly? Or are you typing it in?
URI valet might help you troubleshoot this further. Or if you want to DM me the URL, I can take a look and see if I can identify the problem.
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
-
How bad are 403 errors compared to 404s in regards to technical SEO?
Google Webmaster Tools reports "Access Denied" 403 errors. They also provide an explanation of what they mean at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2409441?ctx=MCE&ctx=AD&hl=en. What are the implications of these Access Denied errors? Should they be 301 redirected internally?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Sitemap error
Hey Guys Everytime I run the tester through google webmaster tools - I keep getting an error that tells me "Your Sitemap appears to be an HTML page. Please use a supported sitemap format instead." An idea how to go about fixing this without changing the site around? https://www.zenory.co.nz/sitemap I have seen competitors sitemaps look similar to mine. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Duplicate page content errors stemming from CMS
Hello! We've recently relaunched (and completely restructured) our website. All looks well except for some duplicate content issues. Our internal CMS (custom) adds a /content/ to each page. Our development team has also set-up URLs to work without /content/. Is there a way I can tell Google that these are the same pages. I looked into the parameters tool, but that seemed more in-line with ecommerce and the like. Am I missing anything else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | taylor.craig0 -
How to fix Invalid Product Page registering as Soft 404
Somehow with our site architecture Google is crawling URLS for products we no longer carry (there are no links to those pages so I am still trying to figure out how Google is finding them).Those URLS are being redirected to our invalid product page. That invalid product page is returning a 200 OK code, but according to Google it should be a 404 so we get a soft 404 error. Google is seeing all of the URLs that redirect to that page as soft 404's as well. The first solution I can think of is to create a custom 404 page that looks just like our site, says we don't have the page/product they are looking for, has a search bar, sends a 404 code, etc. Is this the right way to go? And it will probably take some time to implement so is there a quick fix we could do first?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ntsupply0 -
Soft 404
Hey forum, My site is a Price Comparison site. Lately I've been getting some "Soft 404" errors with the Webmaster tool. I'll try to explain the steps causing it: 1. There's a valid link to a product 2. At some point the product is temporary out of stock or unavailable. 3. Google crawls this product page, getting a valid page with a message explaining this product is unavailable at this time. 4. Google see this page for few different products and (I assume) figures it's a none existing page and so it's a soft 404. The possible solutions I see are: 1. Return real 404, I'm not a fan of this solution, because these links will very likely be valid again when the product is back in stock. 2. Live with some "soft 404" errors in the webmaster tool. 3. Find another way to explain to Google that it's not a real 404. This sounds great but I'm not sure how this can be done. Any thoughts which would be the best method? Or maybe another solution I haven't thought of? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corwin0 -
Wordpress error
On our Google Webmaster Tools I'm getting a Severe Health Warning regarding our Robot.txt file reading: User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NileCruises
Crawl-delay: 20 User-agent: 008
Disallow: / I'm wondering how I can fix this and stop it happening again. The site was hacked about 4 months ago but I thought we'd managed to clear things up. Colin0 -
Robots.txt 404 problem
I've just set up a wordpress site with a hosting company who only allow you to install your wordpress site in http://www.myurl.com/folder as opposed to the root folder. I now have the problem that the robots.txt file only works in http://www.myurl./com/folder/robots.txt Of course google is looking for it at http://www.myurl.com/robots.txt and returning a 404 error. How can I get around this? Is there a way to tell google in webmaster tools to use a different path to locate it? I'm stumped?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
404'd pages still in index
I recently launched a site and shortly after performed a URL rewrite (not the greatest idea, i know). The developer 404'd the old pages instead of a permanent 301 redirect. This caused a mess in the index. I have tried to use Google's removal tool to remove these URL's from the index. These pages were being removed but now I am finding them in the index as just URL's to the 404'd page (i.e. no title tag or meta description). Should I wait this out or now go back and 301 redirect the old URL's (that are 404'd now) to the new URL's? I am sure this is the reason for my lack of ranking as the rest of my site is pretty well optimized and I have some quality links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mj7750