Confused about repeated occurences of URL/essayorg/topic/ showing up as 404 errors in our site logs
-
Working on a Wordpress website, https://thedoctorwithin.comScanning the site’s 404 errors, I’m seeing a lot of searches for URL/essayorg/topic, coming from Bingbot, as well as other spiders (Google, OpensiteExlorer). We get at least 200 of these irrelevant requests per week. Seems like each topic that follows /essayorg/ is unique. Some include typos: /dissitation/Haven't done a verification to make sure the spiders are who they say they are, yet.Almost seems like there are many links ‘in the wild’ intended for Essay.Org that are being directed towards the site I’m working on.I've considered redirecting any requests for URL/essayorg/ to our sitemap… figuring that might encourage further spidering of actual site content.
- Is redirection to our sitemap xml file a good idea, or might doing so have unintended consequences?
- Interested in suggestions about why this might be occurring.
Thank you.
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
-
Spammy structured data for http://www.heritageprinting.com/ might be dropped from search results
We received the above message, which I'm see may also have. Before I go making hours of edits can someone give me an opinion on what may need fixed? Here's a link to one of our products: http://heritageprinting.com/products/step-and-repeat.phpAll products are uniquely marked upIt may be the $ dollar sign, but I'm not certain.Looking at WMT > Search Appearance > Structured Data, I see no errors for Schema Markup. TY in advance :)KJr
Technical SEO | | KevnJr0 -
Wordpress 404 Errors
Hi Guys, One of my clients is scratching his head after a site migration. He has moved to wordpress and now GWT is creating weird and wonderful strange 404 errors. For example http://www.allsee-tech.com/digital-signage-blog/category/clients.html There are loads like the above which seem to be made up out of his blog and navigation http://www.allsee-tech.com/clients.html works! Any ideas? Is it a rogue plugin? How do we fix? Kind Regards Neil
Technical SEO | | nezona0 -
How i can remove 404 redirect error (Wordpress)
Hello ,
Technical SEO | | mayankebabu
I am getting 404 error in some pages of my wordpress site http://engineerbabu.com/ .
Those pages are permanently removed. Is there any plugin to fix this prob or anyway so that google will not crawl these pages.0 -
Sitemap issue - Tons of 404 errors
We've recreated a client site in a subdirectory (mysite.com/newsite) of his domain and when it was ready to go live, added code to the htaccess file in order to display the revamped website on the main url. These are the directions that were followed to do this: http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory and http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress#When_Your_Domain_Name_or_URLs_Change. This has worked perfectly except that we are now receiving a lot of 404 errors am I'm wondering if this isn't the root of our evil. This is a WordPress self-hosted website and we are actively using the WordPress SEO plugin that creates multiple folders with only 50 links in each. The sitemap_index.xml file tests well in Google Analytics but is pulling a number of links from the subdirectory folder. I'm wondering if it really is the manner in which we made the site live that is our issue or if there is another problem that I cannot see yet. What is the best way to attack this issue? Any clues? The site in question is www.atozqualityfencing.com https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/
Technical SEO | | JanetJ0 -
WebMaster Tools keeps showing old 404 error but doesn't show a "Linked From" url. Why is that?
Hello Moz Community. I have a question about 404 crawl errors in WebmasterTools, a while ago we had an internal linking problem regarding some links formed in a wrong way (a loop was making links on the fly), this error was identified and fixed back then but before it was fixed google got to index lots of those malformed pages. Recently we see in our WebMaster account that some of this links still appearing as 404 but we currently don't have that issue or any internal link pointing to any of those URLs and what confuses us even more is that WebMaster doesn't show anything in the "Linked From" tab where it usually does for this type of errors, so we are wondering what this means, could be that they still in google's cache or memory? we are not really sure. If anyone has an idea of what this errors showing up now means we would really appreciate the help. Thanks. jZVh7zt.png
Technical SEO | | revimedia1 -
Redirects & 404 Errors
Hi everyone, I'm probably missing some GLARING error here, but I'm hoping you can help me! We recently built a new website on Wordpress and attempted to use a redirect plugin to take care of some old pages. The issue we are having though, is that when you click an old link you are not automatically redirected and instead are given a 404 error page. Then, when you try to view another page (by clicking a navigation item), every pages shows a 404 error. I implemented a redirect plugin, however it seems to start to work then still throws the 404 page. I believe this has something to do with the htaccess file which has the standard WP rewrite info in there... The way the old site was setup was kind of janky, so wondering if it's on that side or if I'm just going crazy. An old URL example would be http://orchards inn.com/index.php/specials and the new page is http://orchardsinn.com/special-offers. Sometimes the redirect seems to work, and others it actually throws a 404 page, then every other page in the navigation is 404'd as well. Your help is GREATLY appreciated!!
Technical SEO | | marisolmarketing0 -
404 error due to a page which requires a login
what do I do with 404 errors reported in webmaster tools that are actually URLs where users are clicking a link that requires them to log in (so they get sent to a login page). what's the best practice in these cases? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | joshuakrafchin0