All urls seem to exist (no 404 errors) but they don't.
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Hello I am doing a SEO auditing for a website which only has a few pages. I have no cPanel credentials, no FTP no Wordpress admin account, just watching it from the outside.
The site works, the Moz crawler didn't report any problem, I can reach every page from the menu.
The problem is that - except for the few actual pages - no matter what you type after the domain name, you always reach the home page and don't get any 404 error.
I.E.
Http://domain.com/oiuxyxyzbpoyob/ (there is no such a page, but i don't get 404 error, the home is displayed and the url in the browser remains Http://domain.com/oiubpoyob/, so it's not a 301 redirect).
Http://domain.com/WhatEverYouType/ (same)
- Could this be an important SEO issue (i.e. resulting in infinite amount of duplicate content pages )?
- Do you think I should require the owner to prevent this from happening?
- Should I look into the .htaccess file to fix it ?
Thank you Mozers!
-
Hi,
This is indeed an SEO issue, because you could possibly get an infinite ammount of duplicate content pages of your homepage. I do not think it is a major issue (i think that Google in Webmaster tool handles it as a soft 404). But from a user standpoint it is weird and not really use friendly.
It could be managed in the HTACCES but could also be a Wordpress setup. So it depends.
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