Mystery 404's
-
I have a large number of 404's that all have a similar structure: www.kempruge.com/example/kemprugelaw. kemprugelaw keeps getting stuck on the end of url's. While I created www.kempruge.com/example/ I never created the www.kempruge.com/example/kemprugelaw page or edited permalinks to have kemprugelaw at the end of the url. Any idea how this happens? And what I can do to make it stop?
Thanks,
Ruben
-
One by one is fine with me. I'd much prefer that to screwing up the site.
Thanks again,
Ruben
-
Hi Ruben
I'm glad that has helped you
There is one way you could do multiple updates BUT I would not recommend it as doing it wrong could screw up your site. You could do it via the control panel in your site's hosting by querying your MySQL database via PHPMyAdmin and doing a bulk search and update for all references to www.kempruge.com where it doesn't have http:// in front and replacing www.kemruge.com with http://www.kempruge.com.
Although it is a pain I know, the best way is to fix the errors one by one in the pages themselves and leave the redirects running until you are sure that Google, Bing and Yahoo have updated their indexes, then you can remove them.
If you copy http:// onto your Mac/PC clipboard, then it will make it quicker to open the link dialog and paste at the start of the URL.
Peter
-
Peter,
You're a genius! I'm almost certain that's it, because I can't remember adding "http://" Is there a way to get rid of those pages? I just 301 redirected them to where they are supposed to go, but I have a lot of redirects. When I say a lot, I mean a lot relative to how many pages I have. We have 500 something indexed pages, and probably 200 something redirects. I know that many redirects slows our site down. I'd like to know if there's any better option that the 301s, if I can't just delete them.
Thanks,
Ruben
-
Hi Ruben
You mentioned: In GWT, the 404s are slightly different. They are www.kempruge.com/example/www.kempruge.com
I have seen this type of thing before, or something similar, when an absolute link has been entered into some anchor text or by itself without adding http:// before the link.
So the link has been entered as www.mydomain.com - which causes the error - but it should be entered as http://www.mydomain.com
Your issue may be something completely different, but I thought I would post this as a possible solution.
Peter
-
In GWT, the 404s are slightly different. They are www.kempruge.com/example/www.kempruge.com
In BWT, it's the www.kempruge.com/example/kemprugelaw
In GWT, they say the 404's are coming from my site, but I couldn't find out where it says that for BWT.
Any thoughts, and thanks for helping out. This has been bothering me for awhile.
Ruben
-
It says it in Webmaster Tools, does that matter? I'm going to check on where from now. Also, I know my sitemap 404's, but I can't figure out what happened. If you go here: http://www.kempruge.com/category/news/feed/ that's my sitemap. How it got changed to that, I have no idea. Plus, I can't find that page in the backend of WP to change the url back to the old one.
I tried redirecting the proper sitemap name to the one that works, but that didn't seem to work.
-
I crawled your site and didn't see the 404 errors.
I did notice that your sitemap in your robots.txt 404's so you may want to take a look at that.
-
Are you seeing these 404s in Webmaster Tools or when crawling the site?
If WMT where does it say the 404 is linked to from? Click on the URL with the 404 error in WMT and select the "Linked from" tab.
Crawl the site with Screaming Frog and your user agent set to Googlebot. See if the same 404 errors are being picked up and if so, you can click on them and select the "In Links" tab to see what page the 404 is being picked up on.
I checked the source code of some of the pages on www.kempruge.com and didn't see any relative links which usually create problems like this. My bet is on a site scraping your site and creating 404 errors when they link back to your site.
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
-
Can a duplicate page referencing the original page on another domain in another country using the 'canonical link' still get indexed locally?
Hi I wonder if anyone could help me on a canonical link query/indexing issue. I have given an overview, intended solution and question below. Any advice on this query will be much appreciated. Overview: I have a client who has a .com domain that includes blog content intended for the US market using the correct lang tags. The client also has a .co.uk site without a blog but looking at creating one. As the target keywords and content are relevant across both UK and US markets and not to duplicate work the client has asked would it be worthwhile centralising the blog or provide any other efficient blog site structure recommendations. Suggested solution: As the domain authority (DA) on the .com/.co.uk sites are in the 60+ it would risky moving domains/subdomain at this stage and would be a waste not to utilise the DAs that have built up on both sites. I have suggested they keep both sites and share the same content between them using a content curated WP plugin and using the 'canonical link' to reference the original source (US or UK) - so not to get duplicate content issues. My question: Let's say I'm a potential customer in the UK and i'm searching using a keyword phrase that the content that answers my query is on both the UK and US site although the US content is the original source.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JonRayner
Will the US or UK version blog appear in UK SERPs? My gut is the UK blog will as Google will try and serve me the most appropriate version of the content and as I'm in the UK it will be this version, even though I have identified the US source using the canonical link?2 -
Getting out of Google's Penguin
Hi all, my site www.uniggardin.dk has lost major rankings on the searchengine google.dk. Went from rank #2-3 on important keywords to my site, and after the latest update most of my rankings have jumped to #12 - #20. This is so annoying, and I really have no idea what to do. Can it cause bad links to my site? In that case what will I have to do? Thanks in advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Xpeztumdk
Christoffer0 -
There's NO reason these sites should be beating mine...Or is there?
Hi Over the past 10 months, my internal page rankings (previously excellent) have plummeted. I'm now trying to recover them. I haven't received an unnatural links warning in Google Webmaster Tools. Also, I used to have hundreds of internal links to each of these 21 pages using the same exact-match anchor text eg, Tuscany real estate, Umbria real estate, etc. I changed this about 6 months ago. So why am I still ranking poorly for these (only moderately competitive keywords) behind sites with poorer metrics? 1) Keyword: lake como real estate My page here – **http://tinyurl.com/d34k8m ** -- used to rank No1 or No2 neck-and-neck with this page www.immobiliarevacanzelago.com/. He's still No1 but I’m down to about No13. Yet when I look in Open Site Explorer virtually all my metrics beat his.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jeepster0 -
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 -
Google fluctuates its result on Chrome's private browsing
I have seen an interesting Google behaviour this morning. As usual, I would open Chrome's private browsing to see how a keyword is ranking. This was what I see... Typed in "sell my car", I see Auto Trader page on 3rd. (Ref:Sell My Car 1st result img) Googled something else, then re-Googled "sell my car" and saw that our page went to 2nd! I repeated the same process and saw that we went from 3rd to 2nd again. Has Google results gone mental? PaGXJ.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tmg.seo0 -
About to launch a new e-commerce site need help with anchor text's
Hey guys, I need some advice regarding the keywords I want to target for a new website. The website is e-commerce and is about 60% done but i wanted some advice. home page - http://www.diamondengagement.com/ For link building purposes I only want to target the domain name for the anchor text "diamond engagement" and "diamondengagement.com" for internal pages like .... http://www.diamondengagement.com/engagement-rings/ I want this page to rank for "engagement rings" but that's a very competitive keyword. I was thinking for the first 3 or 4 months I only build links to this page with the domain name again "diamond engagement" and phrase anchor text's using "diamond engagement" than just out right building "engagement rings" or "engagement ring" to start off. What are your thoughts??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | harrykabadaian0 -
Our site has been penalized and it's proving to be very hard to get our rankings back...
So I have a question. We have used nearly every trick in the book to rank our site, including a ton of white hat stuff.... but then also a lot of black hat practices that resulted in us dropping in the rankings by about 30-40 positions. And getting back to where we were (top 10 for most keywords) is proving to be nearly impossible. We have a ton of great content coming off of the site and we actually offer a quality product. We follow most of the guidelines advocated here on SEOmoz. But the black hat stuff we did has really taken a toll. And it's gonna be pretty much impossible to go back in time and erase all of the Black Hat stuff we did. So what should we do? Should we design a completely new website with a new domain? What can be done to help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LilyRay0 -
Can you see the 'indexing rules' that are in place for your own site?
By 'index rules' I mean the stipulations that constitute whether or not a given page will be indexed. If you can see them - how?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Visually0