404 not working?
-
Apologies - not strictly a search question, although I am concerned that it may be negatively impacting my sites.
If I enter an invalid URL - the "page not found 404 error" doesn't seem to be working. I can enter http://www.%sitename%/index.php/randomnamemadeup/ and it displays the homepage (albeit with a broken CSS).
I can't fathom it out - any help appreciated. Thanks, David
-
I haven't created one - no.
-
Have you made a custom 404 page? If so, yes.
-
Agree - is this likely to sit in htaccess configuration?
-
I would suggest you to fix this issue soon. Otherwise Google may report soft 404 error at one fine day.
Also check your redirect rules. Redirecting error pages to home page should be avoided.
-
Hi Martijn, I seem to have the same issue across a number of my PHP sites.
An industry friend that I link to brought the issue to my attention - he dropped me a line to highlight that alot of these random pages are shown to be linking to his site - rather than just the homepage. I haven't managed to catch up with him to ask where this linking data has come from yet.
Apologies if I haven't explained this very well, but this is high on my list of things I'd like to fix.
- Appreciate there are other things I need to do on this website.
Thanks, David
-
Hi David,
It's not very cool that random urls are not responding with a 404 status code error. But for now I think you have other items to fix first. Because as long as you're not linking external or internal to these 'broken pages' also Google isn't able to find them. And so won't think the site has a lot of soft 404 errors. To be sure the best would be to take a look at the crawl errors within your Google Webmaster Tools account. If there are a lot of recent (soft) 404 pages/ errors found by Google I would move this more to the top of my todo list.
I would prefer myself to fix them later on, but like many things you probably have a lot of other todos you want to take care of first.
Hope this helps!
-
Hi Marisa, try http://www.videogameprices.co.uk/index.php/randomulr/.
Many thanks.
-
We'd need to know your domain name so we can replicate the error.
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
-
When rogerbot tried to crawl my site it gets a 404\. Why?
When rogerbot tries to craw my site it tries http://website.com. My website then tries to redirect to http://www.website.com and is throwing a 404 and ends up not getting crawled. It also throws a 404 when trying to read my robots.txt file for some reason. We allow rogerbot user agent so unsure whats happening here. Is there something weird going on when trying to access my site without the 'www' that is causing the 404? Any insight is helpful here. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | BlakeBooth0 -
Structured Data Mark Up Helper 404?
Whenever I put our URL into markup helper, it returns not found 404.
Technical SEO | | RayflexGroup
I've tried this for different pages, different categories and it all returns the same "not found 404" - I did also trial other websites to see if it was an issue with the markup helper but everything returned fine.
Has anyone else had this issue or know how to resolve?0 -
Rebranding: 404 to homepage?
Hello all!
Technical SEO | | JohnPalmer
I did a rebranding, [Domain A] -> [Domain B]. what to do with all the 404 pages? 1. [Domain A (404)] -> [Domain B (homepage)]?
2. [Domain A (404)] -> [Domain B (404 page + same url) - for example: xixix.com/page/bla What do you think ?0 -
Matt Cutts says 404 unavailable products on the 'average' ecommerce site.
If you're an ecommerce site owner, will you be changing how you deal with unavailable products as a result of the recent video from Matt Cutts? Will you be moving over to a 404 instead of leaving the pages live still? For us, as more products were becoming unavailable, I had started to worry about the impact of this on the website (bad user experience, Panda issues from bounce rates, etc.). But, having spoken to other website owners, some say it's better to leave the unavailable product pages there as this offers more value (it ranks well so attracts traffic, links to those pages, it allows you to get the product back up quickly if it unexpectedly becomes available, etc.). I guess there's many solutions, for example, using ItemAvailability schema, that might be better than a 404 (custom or not). But then, if it's showing as unavailable on the SERPS, will anyone bother clicking on it anyway...? Would be interested in your thoughts.
Technical SEO | | Coraltoes770 -
I have a 404 error on my site i can't find.
I have looked everywhere. I thought it might have just showed up while making some changes, so while in webmaster tools i said it was fixed.....It's still there. Even moz pro found it. error is http://mydomain.com/mydomain.com No idea how it even happened. thought it might be a plugin problem. Any ideas how to fix this?
Technical SEO | | NateStewart0 -
How can i get google adsense to work properly to earn income
Hi i am trying to get google adsense to work properly but i am not winning. What i am trying to do is, to get the adverts to reflect on the content. So for example this page here http://www.in2town.co.uk/news/mark-feehily/westlife-mark-feehily-announces-split-from-long-term-boyfriend I would like google adsense to have celebrity adverts such as celebrity news sites, celebrity fashion, concert tickets etc. I want the adverts to be related to celebrity but it is not happening. Can anyone please let me know how to do this and also if i have the google adsense in the right place as since rebuilding the site we have not earned anything with google adsense many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Does duplicate content on word press work against the site rank? (not page rank)
I noticed in the crawl that there seems to be some duplicate content with my word press blog. I installed a seo plugin, Yoast's wordpress seo plugin, and set it to keep from crawling the archives. This might solve the problem but my main question is can the blog drag my site down?
Technical SEO | | tommr10 -
We're working on a site that is a beer company. Because it is required to have an age verification page, how should we best redirect the bots (useragents) to the actual homepage (thus skipping ahead of the age verification without allowing all browsers)?
This question is about useragents and alcohol sites that have an age verification screen upon landing on the site.
Technical SEO | | OveritMedia0