404 not working?
-
Apologies - not strictly a search question, although I am concerned that it may be negatively impacting my sites.
If I enter an invalid URL - the "page not found 404 error" doesn't seem to be working. I can enter http://www.%sitename%/index.php/randomnamemadeup/ and it displays the homepage (albeit with a broken CSS).
I can't fathom it out - any help appreciated. Thanks, David
-
I haven't created one - no.
-
Have you made a custom 404 page? If so, yes.
-
Agree - is this likely to sit in htaccess configuration?
-
I would suggest you to fix this issue soon. Otherwise Google may report soft 404 error at one fine day.
Also check your redirect rules. Redirecting error pages to home page should be avoided.
-
Hi Martijn, I seem to have the same issue across a number of my PHP sites.
An industry friend that I link to brought the issue to my attention - he dropped me a line to highlight that alot of these random pages are shown to be linking to his site - rather than just the homepage. I haven't managed to catch up with him to ask where this linking data has come from yet.
Apologies if I haven't explained this very well, but this is high on my list of things I'd like to fix.
- Appreciate there are other things I need to do on this website.
Thanks, David
-
Hi David,
It's not very cool that random urls are not responding with a 404 status code error. But for now I think you have other items to fix first. Because as long as you're not linking external or internal to these 'broken pages' also Google isn't able to find them. And so won't think the site has a lot of soft 404 errors. To be sure the best would be to take a look at the crawl errors within your Google Webmaster Tools account. If there are a lot of recent (soft) 404 pages/ errors found by Google I would move this more to the top of my todo list.
I would prefer myself to fix them later on, but like many things you probably have a lot of other todos you want to take care of first.
Hope this helps!
-
Hi Marisa, try http://www.videogameprices.co.uk/index.php/randomulr/.
Many thanks.
-
We'd need to know your domain name so we can replicate the error.
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
-
Unsolved URL dynamic structure issue for new global site where I will redirect multiple well-working sites.
Dear all, We are working on a new platform called [https://www.piktalent.com](link url), were basically we aim to redirect many smaller sites we have with quite a lot of SEO traffic related to internships. Our previous sites are some like www.spain-internship.com, www.europe-internship.com and other similars we have (around 9). Our idea is to smoothly redirect a bit by a bit many of the sites to this new platform which is a custom made site in python and node, much more scalable and willing to develop app, etc etc etc...to become a bigger platform. For the new site, we decided to create 3 areas for the main content: piktalent.com/opportunities (all the vacancies) , piktalent.com/internships and piktalent.com/jobs so we can categorize the different types of pages and things we have and under opportunities we have all the vacancies. The problem comes with the site when we generate the diferent static landings and dynamic searches. We have static landing pages generated like www.piktalent.com/internships/madrid but dynamically it also generates www.piktalent.com/opportunities?search=madrid. Also, most of the searches will generate that type of urls, not following the structure of Domain name / type of vacancy/ city / name of the vacancy following the dynamic search structure. I have been thinking 2 potential solutions for this, either applying canonicals, or adding the suffix in webmasters as non index.... but... What do you think is the right approach for this? I am worried about potential duplicate content and conflicts between static content dynamic one. My CTO insists that the dynamic has to be like that but.... I am not 100% sure. Someone can provide input on this? Is there a way to block the dynamic urls generated? Someone with a similar experience? Regards,
Technical SEO | | Jose_jimenez0 -
Crawl errors - 2,513 not found. Response code 404
Hi,
Technical SEO | | JamesHancocks1
I've just inherited a website that I'll be looking after. I've looked in the Search Console in the Crawl errors section and discovered thousands of urls that point to non- existent pages on Desktop. There's 1,128 on Smartphone.
Some are odd and make no sense. for example: | bdfqgnnl-z3543-qh-i39634-imbbfuceonkqrihpbptd/ | Not sure why these have are occurring but what's the best way to deal with them to improve our SEO? | northeast/ | 404 | 8/29/18 |
| | 2 | blog/2016/06/27/top-tips-for-getting-started-with-the-new-computing-curriculum/ | 404 | 8/10/18 |
| | 3 | eastmidlands | 404 | 8/21/18 |
| | 4 | eastmidlands/partner-schools/pingle-school/ | 404 | 8/27/18 |
| | 5 | z3540-hyhyxmw-i18967-fr/ | 404 | 8/19/18 |
| | 6 | northeast/jobs/maths-teacher-4/ | 404 | 8/24/18 |
| | 7 | qfscmpp-z3539-i967-mw/ | 404 | 8/29/18 |
| | 8 | manchester/jobs/history-teacher/ | 404 | 8/5/18 |
| | 9 | eastmidlands/jobs/geography-teacher-4/ | 404 | 8/30/18 |
| | 10 | resources | 404 | 8/26/18 |
| | 11 | blog/2016/03/01/world-book-day-how-can-you-get-your-pupils-involved/ | 404 | 8/31/18 |
| | 12 | onxhtltpudgjhs-z3548-i4967-mnwacunkyaduobb/ | Cheers.
Thanks in advance,
James.0 -
How to get google to forget my old but still working page and list my new fully optimized page for a keyword?
Hi There! (i am beginner in seo) I have dynamic and static pages on our site. I created a static page for a specific keyword. Fully optimized it, (h1, alt, metas, etc.....maybe too optimized). My problem is that this page is alive for weeks, checked it in GWT and it is in robots.txt, google sees it, and indexed it. BUT whenewer i do a search for that keyword, we still appear with the dynamically created link in the google listings. How could i "redirect" google, if sy make a search for that keyword than shows our optimized page? Is there a tool for that? I cant delete the dynamic page... Any ideas? Thx Andrew
Technical SEO | | Neckermann0 -
Will deleting Wordpress tags result in 404 errors or anything?
I want to clean up my tags and I'm worried I'm going to look in my webmasters the next day with hundreds of errors. Whats the best way of doing this?
Technical SEO | | howlusa0 -
What to do with 404 errors when you don't have a similar new page to 301 to ??
Hi If you have 404 errors for pages that you dont have similar content pages to 301 them to, should you just leave them (the 404's are optimised/qood quality with related links & branding etc) and they will eventually be de-indexed since no longer exist or should you 'remove url' in GWT ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Is the seomoz on-page factor :Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical working properly?
I have a word press site with a rel canonical plug in. The rel="canonical" href= is there and the url in there works and goes to the actual page.So why does the seomoz keep giving the warning: Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical
Technical SEO | | CurtCarroll0 -
.htaccess and error 404
Hi, I permit to contact the community again because you have good and quick answer ! Yesterday, I lost the file .htaccess on my server. Right now, only the home page is working and the other pages give me this message : Not Found The requested URL /freshadmin/user/login/ was not found on this server Could you help me please? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Probikeshop0 -
Do sites really need a 404 page?
We have people posting broken links to our site is this looking us link juice as they link to 404 pages. We could redirect to the homepage or just render the home page content, in both cases we can still display a clear page not found message. Is this legal (white hat).
Technical SEO | | ed1234560