404 Error on Spider Emulators
-
I recently began working at a company called Uncommon Goods. I ran a few different spider emulators on our homepage (uncommongoods.com) and I saw a 404 Error on SEO-browser.com as well as URL errors on Summit Media's emulator and SEOMoz's crawler. It seems there is a serious problem here. How is this affecting our site from an SEO standpoint? What are the repercussions?
Also, I know we have a lot of javascript on our homepage..is this causing the 404? Any advice would be much appreciated.
Thanks!
-Zack
-
Hey Zack,
It seems your website is now returning a 200 so you apparently managed to fix the problem.
Was the problem coming from the server configuration as I suggested?
Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer. -
Hi Zack,
Yes, having the home page return a 404 error is a HUGE problem. It actually tells the engines that the page doesn't exist so they will stop crawling it and eventualy drop it from their index even if it returns content.
You should solve this problem ASAP!
Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer. -
Hi Guillaume,
Your comments about Javascript on the client side make complete sense to me now and I will examine our Resin config w/ my IT team. Thanks for explaining. Also, as per Beneeb's advice above, I'm going to try making some changes to robots.txt.
From a bigger picture perspective though, do you think this 404 Error is even that big of a deal? Are we likely to be penalized for this in terms of Page Rank, Domain Authority, etc..??
Thanks for your help!
-Zack
-
Hi Zack,
The 404 error has nothing to do with the robots.txt file, it has to do with your server configuration as I said in my answers bellow.
About the robots.txt file, I would remove the Disallow: line if you don't need to block anything.
Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer. -
Hi Beneeb,
That tool is awesome! It definitely helps, thanks! I'm going to show that report to my IT guys today. I think your guess is a very good one. Hopefully I can persuade them to make the changes and we'll see if it resolves the error.
Best Regards,
-Zack
-
Hi Zack,
To be honest with you, it was just a guess. I used a robots.txt syntax checker and saw several issues. You can check out that same tool here & run your current robots.txt file through it:
http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml
I hope that gets you pushed in the right direction. I'm very new to SEO, but I've worked in the technical support world forever. So, my suggestion is only worth what you paid for it.
-
Hi Beeneeb,
Thank you for your insight. I think this makes sense as I see there is some redundancy in robots.txt as it is now. I'm curious however, why do you think that changing robots.txt will resolve the 404 error?
Best Regards,
-Zack
-
Hi Zack,
Quick followup : Your website will always return 500 to HTTP/1.0 queries. With HTTP/1.1, homepage returns 404 and subpages returns 200.
I saw the website was running on a Resin server rather than a Apache server, then, you might want to look into your Resin server's configuration.
Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer. -
Hi Zack,
Actually, when I use this http header tool and that I input http://www.uncommongoods.com/ I see that the header returned is in fact a 500 Internal Server Error.
The HTTP Header is returned by the server even before the browser can kow that their is javascript on that page so it has nothing to do with javascript.
You'll have to look at the server side as an Internal Server Error and the HTTP Header are returned by the server in opposite to the javascript that is executed client send.
Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer. -
Hi Zack,
Looking at your robots.txt file, you have several errors. I would replace your current robots.txt file with the following:
User-Agent: *
Disallow:Sitemap: http://www.uncommongoods.com/sitemap.xml
(not sure why the message truncated your sitemap file, but you get the picture)
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
-
Subdomain 403 error
Hi Everyone, A crawler from our SEO tool detects a 403 error from a link from our main domain to a a couple of subdomains. However, these subdomains are perfect accessibly. What could be the problem? Is this error caused by the server, the crawlbot or something else? I would love to hear your thoughts.
Technical SEO | | WeAreDigital_BE
Jens0 -
Uninstalled WordPress, now getting 200 errors of 500 response code
Hello there, A little while ago I installed WordPress on the server I use with Bluehost to try out a theme. My business domain name is also the primary account on this server. WordPress was causing some serious issues on the server so I uninstalled it, and now I have over 200 "500 response code" errors according to WebMaster tools. I've included a screenshot of some of them. Could anyone advise me on what to do about this? Thanks so much! MYbW6
Technical SEO | | lulu710 -
Error after scanning with browseo.net
Good day! I have done a scan on my site with browseo.net ( and a few other similar scanners ) and got the mess seen in the screenshot. I've tried deleting all the files in the website folder, replace it with a single image file, but it still shows the same error. What could this mean and should i be worried? P.S Found my answer after contacting the helpful support of browseo.net : It took me some time to figure out what was going on, but it seems as if you are mixing content types. Browsers are quite smart when it comes to interpreting the contents, so they are much more forgiving than we are. Browseo crawls your website and detects that you are setting utf-8 as part of the meta information. By doing so, it converts the content in a different character encoding then what they are supposed to be. In a quick test, I tried to fetch the content type based on the response object, but without any success. So I am suspecting that in reality your content is not utf-8 encoded when you parse it into joomla. The wrong character type is then carried over for the body (which explains why we can still read the header information). All of this explains the error. In order for it to work in browseo, you’d have to set the content type correctly, or convert your own content into utf-8 before parsing. It may be that you are either storing this incorrectly in the database (check your db settings for a different content type other than utf-8) or that other settings are a bit messed up. The good news is, that google is probably interpreting your websites correctly, so you won’t be punished for this, but perhaps something to look into… From Paul Piper VKNNnAL.png?1
Technical SEO | | AlexElks0 -
Help! How to Remove Error Code 901: DNS Errors (But to a URL that doesn't exist!)
I have 2 urgent errors saying there are 2 x error code 909's detected. These don't link to any page - but I can tell there is a mistake somewhere - I just don't know what needs changing. http://www.justkeyrings.co.ukhttp/www.justkeyrings.co.uk/printed-promotional-keyrings http://www.justkeyrings.co.ukhttp/www.justkeyrings.co.uk/blank-unassembled-keyrings Could someone help please? screen-shot-2015-08-11-at-13.18.17.png?t=1439292942
Technical SEO | | FullSteamBusiness0 -
Instead of a 301, my client uses a 302 to custom 404
I've found about 900 instances of decommissioned pages being redirected via 302 to a 404 custom page, even when there's a comparable page elsewhere on the site or on a new subdomain. My recommendation would be to always do a 301 from the legacy page to the new page, but since they're are so many instances of this 302->404 it seems to be standard operating procedure by the dev team. Given that at least one of these pages has links coming from 48 root domains, wouldn't it obviously be much better to 301 redirect it to pass along that equity? I don't get why the developers are doing this, and I have to build a strong case about what they're losing with this 302->404 protocol. I'd love to hear your thoughts on WHY the dev team has settled on this solution, in addition to what suffers as a result. I think I know, but would love some more expert input.
Technical SEO | | Jen_Floyd0 -
Pages appear fine in browser but 404 error when crawled?
I am working on an eCommerce website that has been written in WordPress with the shop pages in E commerce Plus PHP v6.2.7. All the shop product pages appear to work fine in a browser but 404 errors are returned when the pages are crawled. WMT also returns a 404 error when ‘fetch as Google’ is used. Here is a typical page: http://www.flyingjacket.com/proddetail.php?prod=Hepburn-Jacket Why is this page returning a 404 error when crawled? Please help?
Technical SEO | | Web-Incite0 -
Increase in Not Found Errors
Hello All, Looking for input on an issue I am having. We used to have a website www.gazaro.com. It was a price comparison engine for consumers. A shift in the focus of the business resulted in www.360pi.com - a price intelligence tool for retailers.The two websites have similar themes, so I thought it would be valuable to pass SEO juice from the old domain to the new domain.Back in August, I noticed that Gazaro was redirected to 360pi with a meta refresh. I know a 301 redirect is preferable to a meta refresh, so we switched to a 301 redirect.Since that happened, there has been a spike in 404 errors in webmaster tools. If you hover over the url, it is actuallywww.360pi.com/deal/amazon etc etc. It is looking for gazaro urls on the 360pi domain - which don't exist. I think this is hurting our homepage ranking. Our homepage no longer ranks for "price intelligence" when it used to be in pos. 4 or 5. As it turns out, we are ranking #1 for "price intelligence" but with our product page.I'm wondering why the 404 are happening. Is something setup in correctly? Or should I have them switch back to a meta refresh.Thoughts? Thanks for your helpPNM1cYO PNM1cYO
Technical SEO | | AmandaHorne0 -
My 404 page shows in the report as an error.
How can i make my actual 404 page not show up as a 404 error in the report?
Technical SEO | | LindseyNewman0