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
-
My blog's categories are winning over my landing pages, what to do?
Hi My blogs categories for the ecommerce site are by subject and are similar to the product landing pages. Example Domain.com/laptops that sells laptops Domain.com/blog/laptops that shows news and articles on laptops Within the blog posts the links of anchor laptop are to the store. What to do? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet1 -
How should I handle URL's created by an internal search engine?
Hi, I'm aware that internal search result URL's (www.example.co.uk/catalogsearch/result/?q=searchterm) should ideally be blocked using the robots.txt file. Unfortunately the damage has already been done and a large number of internal search result URL's have already been created and indexed by Google. I have double checked and these pages only account for approximately 1.5% of traffic per month. Is there a way I can remove the internal search URL's that have already been indexed and then stop this from happening in the future, I presume the last part would be to disallow /catalogsearch/ in the robots.txt file. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrappleAgency0 -
Looking for good examples of website's geotargeting
I am looking for some examples of sites that handle their global presence well (geotargeting and languages), ideally from a single .com domain thanks! Stephen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | firstconversion0 -
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 -
Pagination Question: Google's 'rel=prev & rel=next' vs Javascript Re-fresh
We currently have all content on one URL and use # and Javascript refresh to paginate pages, and we are wondering if we transition to the Google's recommended pagination if we will see an improvement in traffic. Has anyone gone though a similar transition? What was the result? Did you see an improvement in traffic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
My homepage doesn't rank anymore. It's been replaced by irrelevant subpages which rank around 100-200 instead of top 5.
Hey guys, I think I got some kind of penalty for my homepage. I was in top5 for my keywords. Then a few days ago, my homepage stopped ranking for anything except searching for my domain name in Google. sitename.com/widget-reviews/ previously ranked #3 for "widget reviews"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wearetribe
but now....
sitename.com/widget-training-for-pet-cats/ is ranking #84 for widget reviews instead. Similarly across all my other keywords, irrelevant, wrong pages are ranking. Did I get some kind of penalty?0 -
What's going on with my organic traffic from Google?
I am working on eCommerce website Vista Stores. My website's traffic is going down due to certain reason. I have done R & D and have assumption with auto generated content which I have added on few product pages. You can find out attachment to know more about current situation of traffic. 6789134845_d1a1578960_b.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
What's the best way to hold newly purchased domains over 2 years?
Hi, A friend has just bought 3 domains and is not planning to build websites with them for around 2 years. He asked me what the best thing to do with these domains was...I have 2 ways of look ing at it: a) Putting a holding page on these and submit to Google Webmaster Tools - this way they are indexed by Google and hold search engine trust when the site finally goes up - HOWEVER, if they are not updated with fresh content would that work against them in 2 years time? b) Simply redirect them to their existing site and don't do anything else. Let me know your thoughts. Adido.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adido-1053990