Wordpress No 404
-
Hello,
My issue is that in wordpress 404 does not seem to be working properly.
An example of this is:
sitename.com/category/catname loads the files in that category but I can also type
sitename.com/category/asdasfaasd/catname and it still goes to the posts in that category and does not 404. I can replace the misc text with anything and it does not 404.
My worry is that this can be used to exploit duplicate content.
I've looked at a couple of other sites and they do the same.
I'm using Yoast as my SEO plugin and my theme is elogix from themeforest.
I've tried disabling all plugins, cloudflare and changing theme and the same issue exists.
If anyone can help it would be extremely appreciated.
-
Hi Paul,
Will do. I forgot to mention but I actually found the flaw with the 404 when I was looking at the SEOmoz crawler statistics. It said that my sub categories were duplicate content as the pages it was referring to were assigned to multiple categories.
An example roughly based on my structure that it detected as duplicate content is the posts existing in: /category/seo/no1 and /category/seo/no2 so as a result it was duplicate content. I deleted the sub categories and assigned them all to just the SEO category and realised that the sub categories were still resolving so to troubleshoot this I decided to add a random prefix to the end e.g. /seo/asdnas and the address still resolved to the root category.
My theory was that if someone generated for example 100 urls and built links that google would see it as 100 duplicate pages due to the fact it was not 404ing or changing url when as you said 301ing.
I will close the thread and mark your question as good answer.
Cheers.
-
Hmmm... you should be seeing the URL change in the browser's address bar after the redirect pushes to the corrected URL, Luke. I certainly do in my installs that I confirmed it with.
At any rate, if this answered your question fully, would be a good idea to mark the question as "Answered" to help other users. I'd also love a mark as "Good Answer if you found it valuable.
And yea, absolutely - something new to learn every day. That's what I love about this business
I only remember seeing this correction functionality mentioned once in passing in some documentation, but I couldn't find it by search even though i knew what I was looking for. So no wonder you couldn't scrounge it up.
Paul
-
Hi Paul,
Thanks for clearing that up for me!. When I was playing with it I was extremely confused as normally 301 actually redirects and shows the new URL.
As a temporary solution I ended up stripping the category base meaning it now 404s or 301s to the correct page if you try any of the things I originally mentioned.
I actually did a fair bit of research on it prior to asking on SEOmoz and could not find anything at all about it. I even asked a couple of web developers I know who use Joomla and Drupal and they could not figure it out either.
You clearly do learn something new every day as I had no idea about this prior to your reply.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my question and clearing it up for me, it's appreciated,
Luke
-
WordPress has this error-correction functionality built-in, Luke.
If you user a server header checking tool on that non-existent URL, you'll see that WP is automatically using a 301-redirect to push the user to the correct address each time - so no duplicate content or split authority problems at all.
Paul
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
-
Viewing search results for 'We possibly have internal links that link to 404 pages. What is the most efficient way to check our sites internal links?
We possibly have internal links on our site that point to 404 pages as well as links that point to old pages. I need to tidy this up as efficiently as possible and would like some advice on the best way to go about this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Migrate site from HTML to Wordpress and retain SEO
Hi guys this is a 2 part question so hoping someone is able to assist! 🙂 I own the www.industrytix.com.au/ website which ive been updating manually in Dreamweaver for last 6+ years, it has very high Organic Rankings for most of my targeted keywords which are: industry tix
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IsaCleanse
Industry tickets
breakfest tickets
Stereosonic tickets
CUban Club tickets
etc etc - essentially names of events Im currently about 90% of the way through replicating/improving the content of the website using a Wordpress Theme which is located at www.industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/ so all the URLs/Sites are currently running concurrently. Im using Eventum Theme for hosting events and Woocommerce plugin for products so there is a slighy disconnect between the 'Event Page' and 'Buy tickets/Product page" **For example:
Event page: **http://industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/breakfest-perth/ Ticket/product page: http://industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/product/breakfest-ticket-perth/ Next step is to kill off the old outdated homepage and recirrect all the event pages to the new ones - for retaining SEO value is there a best practices for completing this? (I am planning to move the New WP Installation into the root folder from the /buy-tickets/ folder where its currently staged. For example of OLD to NEW redirrection requirements:
OLD http://www.industrytix.com.au/cuban-club-perth-tickets.php
NEW http://industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/cuban-club-perth-nyd/ OLD http://www.industrytix.com.au/breakfest-tickets.php
NEW EVENT PAGE http://industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/breakfest-perth/
Nicket/product page: http://industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/product/breakfest-ticket-perth/ Any other feedback improvements as far as retaining SEO and not keyword stuffing etc? Thanking you all in advance for taking the time to read this 🙂0 -
Questions Regarding Wordpress Blog Format, Categories and Tag pages...
I'm looking to make some optimizations to a website I'm working on but wanted more input before I get started: Currently, when blogs are posted to the website, the URL for each post looks like this:www.mywebsite.com/blogpost I've heard that for whatever reason, the best practice is to make sure that the blog posts get posted to a blog sub-directory like so: www.mywebsite.com/blog/blogpost If I were to make this change, I'm assuming I would have to 301 redirect all of the existing blogs to their new locations. Is this change worth doing and are there any other considerations I should be taking into account? Also, I'm aware that there are certain schools of thought that category and tag pages should be no-indexed to avoid duplicate content issues. Can anyone shed some light on this from first hand experience? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | goldbergweismancairo0 -
Extra indexed pages from my blog in wordpress
I have a blog on my site which is in WordPress. When you publish an article it creates a couple of urls such as tags, author, category, month, ... . So when you look for indexed pages you see tons of pages for the blog. Does it hurt the SEO. If yes how I can sort it out,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlirezaHamidian0 -
Do you add 404 page into robot file or just add no index tag?
Hi, got different opinion on this so i wanted to double check with your comment is. We've got /404.html page and I was wondering if you would add this page to robot text so it wouldn't be indexed or would you just add no index tag? What would be the best approach? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rubix0 -
Ecommerce SEO - Indexed product pages are returning 404's due to product database removal. HELP!
Hi all, I recently took over an e-commerce start-up project from one of my co-workers (who left the job last week). This previous project manager had uploaded ~2000 products without setting up a robot.txt file, and as a result, all of the product pages were indexed by Google (verified via Google Webmaster Tool). The problem came about when he deleted the entire product database from our hosting service, godaddy and performed a fresh install of Prestashop on our hosting plan. All of the created product pages are now gone, and I'm left with ~2000 broken URL's returning 404's. Currently, the site does not have any products uploaded. From my knowledge, I have to either: canonicalize the broken URL's to the new corresponding product pages, or request Google to remove the broken URL's (I believe this is only a temporary solution, for Google honors URL removal request for 90 days) What is the best way to approach this situation? If I setup a canonicalization, would I have to recreate the deleted pages (to match the URL address) and have those pages redirect to the new product pages (canonicalization)? Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | byoung860 -
redirect 404 pages to homepage
Hello, I'm puting a new website on a existing domain. In order to not loose the links that point to the varios old url I would like to redirect them to homepage. The old website was a mess as there was no seo and the pages didn't target any keywords. Thats why I would like to redirect all links to home. What do you think is the best way to do this ? I tried to ad this in the .htaccess but it's not working; ErrorDocument 404 /index.php Con you tell me how it exacly look? Now the hole file is like this: @package Joomla @copyright Copyright (C) 2005 - 2012 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved. @license GNU General Public License version 2 or later; see LICENSE.txt READ THIS COMPLETELY IF YOU CHOOSE TO USE THIS FILE! The line just below this section: 'Options +FollowSymLinks' may cause problems with some server configurations. It is required for use of mod_rewrite, but may already be set by your server administrator in a way that dissallows changing it in your .htaccess file. If using it causes your server to error out, comment it out (add # to beginning of line), reload your site in your browser and test your sef url's. If they work, it has been set by your server administrator and you do not need it set here. Can be commented out if causes errors, see notes above. Options +FollowSymLinks Mod_rewrite in use. RewriteEngine On Begin - Rewrite rules to block out some common exploits. If you experience problems on your site block out the operations listed below This attempts to block the most common type of exploit attempts to Joomla! Block out any script trying to base64_encode data within the URL. RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} base64_encode[^(]([^)]) [OR] Block out any script that includes a
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | igrizo0 -
301 to 404
Hello Everybody, I've got a technical question about server responses. Imagine this scenario: www.domain.com/not-existing-page/ --> 404 & domain.com/not-existing-page/ --> www.domain.com/not-existing-page/ --> 404 I use Wordpress for my websites and I can't seem to be able to configure it (or the server where I have total control) to stop it doing this. Ideally, a non-existent url should return 404 instantly, not first redirect to the "corect" url and then return 404. Anyone experiencing this and can help? Here's a neat tool that allows you to quickly check server response codes - for those of you who are new to this: http://responsetester.appspot.com/ Much appreciated! Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pwpaneuro1