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
-
Find all external 404 errors/links?
Hi All, We have recently discovered a site was linking to our site but it was linking to an incorrect url, resulting in a 404 error. We had only found this by pure chance and wondered if there was a tool out there that will tell us when a site is linking to an incorrect url on our site? Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
Thousands of 404-pages, duplicate content pages, temporary redirect
Hi, i take over the SEO of a quite large e-commerce-site. After checking crawl issues, there seems to be +3000 4xx client errors, +3000 duplicate content issues and +35000 temporary redirects. I'm quite desperate regarding these results. What would be the most effective way to handle that. It's a magento shop. I'm grateful for any kind of help! Thx,
Technical SEO | | posthumus
boris0 -
Hundreds of 404 errors are showing up for pages that never existed
For our site, Google is suddenly reporting hundreds of 404 errors, but the pages they are reporting never existed. The links Google shows are clearly spam style, but the website hasn't been hacked. This happened a few weeks ago, and after a couple days they disappeared from WMT. What's the deal? Screen-Shot-2016-02-29-at-9.35.18-AM.png
Technical SEO | | MichaelGregory0 -
404 not found page appears as 200 success in Google Fetch. What to do to correct?
We have received messages in Google webmaster tools that there is an increase in soft 404 errors. When we check the URLs they send to the 404 not found page:
Technical SEO | | Madlena
For example, http://www.geographics.com/images/01904_S.jpg
redirects to http://www.geographics.com/404.shtml.
When we used fetch as Google, here is what we got: .
#1 Server Response: http://www.geographics.com/404.shtml
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 14:26:59 GMT
What is wrong and what shall we do? The soft 404 errors are mainly for images that no longer exist in the server. Thanks!0 -
301 redirect not working
Hi there! I have recently moved a domain that has been indexed by google and setup redirects so that it forwards to the new domain. It seems like the only redirect that actually is working is the canonical and main domain but every other page and or page nested within a folder are not working. Here is an example of some of the redirects. Am I doing this wrong? It seems to be going to the new domain but can't find the actual pages.... RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | twotd
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !agoodsweep.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://agoodsweep.com/$1 [L,R=301]
redirect 301 woodstoveservicerepair.html http://agoodsweep.com/woodstoveservicerepair/
redirect 301 /westchesterchimney.html http://agoodsweep.com/west-chester-chimney/ Thanks in advance for any help!!0 -
404's in WMT are old pages and referrer links no longer linking to them.
Within the last 6 days, Google Webmaster Tools has shown a jump in 404's - around 7000. The 404 pages are from our old browse from an old platform, we no longer use them or link to them. I don't know how Google is finding these pages, when I check the referrer links, they are either 404's themselves or the page exists but the link to the 404 in question is not on the page or in the source code. The sitemap is also often referenced as a referrer but these links are definitely not in our sitemap and haven't been for some time. So it looks to me like the referrer data is outdated. Is that possible? But somehow these pages are still being found, any ideas on how I can diagnose the problem and find out how google is finding them?
Technical SEO | | rock220 -
404 errors on non-existent URLs
Hey guys and gals, First Moz Q&A for me and really looking forward to being part of the community. I hope as my first question this isn't a stupid one but I was just struggling to find any resource that dealt with the issue and am just looking for some general advice. Basically a client has raised a problem with 404 error pages - or the lack thereof- on non-existent URLs on their site; let's say for example: 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towels/asdfas' Obviously content never existed on this page so its not like you're saying 'hey, sorry this isn't here anymore'; its more like- 'there was never anything here in the first place'. Currently in this fictitious example typing in 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towels/asdfas**'** returns the same content as the 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towels' page which I appreciate isn't ideal. What I was wondering is how far do you take this issue- I've seen examples here on the seomoz site where you can edit the URI in a similar manner and it returns the same content as the parent page but with the alternate address. Should 404's be added across all folders on a site in a similar way? How often would this scenario be and issue particularly for internal pages two or three clicks down? I suppose unless someone linked to a page with a misspelled URL... Also would it be worth placing 301 redirects on a small number of common mis-spellings or typos e.g. 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towles' to the correct URLs as opposed to just 404s? Many thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | AJ2340 -
404 help
Hello all, firstly let me apologize if this is the wrong place to ask this question. I have a site www.promptresponseaccidentmanagement.com which gets a 200ok when checked for crawl issues, however pages such as /whiplash-injury-compensation-claims.php , /road-traffic-accident-compensation-claims.php and quite a few more return a 404. That's fine (usually) as I can quite happily fix that most of the time. However if you actually go to those pages in your browser, or click through to them on any part of the site you will see that they are in fact not redirecting to a 404 and everything is fine!? Any body got any ideas? Best H
Technical SEO | | haydyn0