Help with strange 404 Errors.
-
For the most part I have never had trouble tracking down 404's. Usually it's simply a broken link, but lately I have been getting these strange errors
http://gridironexperts.com/http%3A/www.nfl.com/gamecenter?game_id=29528&season=2008&displayPage=tab_gamecenter/
- What does; %C2%94 repersent?
- The error always points to NFL.com, but we don't link to them...like ever?
- Can I just 404: http://gridironexperts.com// to fix the problem, as all 404's start with this weird %C2%94 error.
- Is this error even on my site? Is in the backend...virus?
thanks
-Mike
-
When you say it did not fix them, do you mean that the 301 was not working, or that the 404s did not go away in the GWT report?
You will not see an immediate change in GWT for those errors. They may take 30-90 days to clear out. If you have them fixed, you can mark them as such and then take the error out of your console.
As a part of the SEO Membership, check out the SEOMoz report for some option. I have used Screaming Frog SEO spider with some success to look through my site and find random links.
P
-
Just to clarify. 404s dont always come from links on your site. Often, these are links on other sites etc that Google has in its index that they found somewhere and are trying to see if the 404s dont work.
Not saying that it is not malware, but clarifying the angle on these.
-
Actually. I tried to 301 direct http://gridironexperts.com// to the home page and it didn't fix the 404's.
can you send me a link to that spider reference you mentioned
-
Thanks - please mark as answered and like if you please!
-
cool that's what I was thinking. Thanks so much. awesome answer
you went above and beyond
-
Hey there. The %C2 %94 %3A are simply ASCII values of encoded versions of special characters in the URL.
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp
%3A is the same as a colon
%C2 is Â
%94 is "
This simply puts those characters in a format that is easier for the browser to read and then convert into a format it can use.
Couple of things to check on where this comes from.
Get a spider program and see if somewhere, waaay out there in the back ends of your content library that you have some crazy goofed up link that got planted here. Find it an delete it
Other than that, somewhere out on the internets, as my developer likes to say, "A bunch of monkeys banged heads on keyboards" There are site scrapers that do not do a good job and take your content and then repost it and they screw up all kinds of formatting and you end up with links like the above pointing to your site. The spiders look for it and you get a 404.
I just did a Google search on
www.nfl.com/gamecenter?game_id=29528&season=2008&displayPage=tab_gamecenter/
and you get all kinds of random pages linking to that.
Here is what I would do. You mention most errors start with
You can 301 all those to another page. Or, show a simple helpful page for the user to navigate off of with a noindex, nofollow meta tag. The noindex tag would get those pages out of the index at least and not show a 404 error.
-
You may want to check GWT under malware. That seems odd that you never link to NFL, but the 404 is coming from your site.
Check the source code of those particular pages that are giving the 404s. Check line by line for anything you don't recognize. Also, make SURE there aren't any .ru TLDs there.
When my site got attacked, my hosting company stepped up and did a scan of malware and they found severall things. So maybe your hosting company can do a scan for 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
-
Who is correct - please help!
I have a website with a lot of product pages - often thousands of pages. As each of these pages is for a specific lease car they are often only fractionally different from other pages. The urls are too long, the H1 is often too long and the Title is often too long for "SEO best practice". And they do create duplication issues according to MOZ. Some people tell me to change them to noindex/nofollow whilst others tell me to leave them as they are as best not to hide from google crawler. Any advice will be gratefully received. Thanks for listening.
Technical SEO | | jlhitch0 -
Sitemap do they get cleared when its a 404
Hi, Sitemap do they get cleared when its a 404. We have a drupal site and a sitemap that has 60K links and i want to know if in these 4 years we deleted 100's of links and do they have them automatically cleared from Sitemap or we need to build the sitemap again? Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Google webmaster errors
**If you know what these google webmasters errors mean, and you can explain it to me in simple english and tell me how I can locate the problem, I would really appreciate it!. <colgroup><col width=""><col width=""><col width=""><col width=""><col width="*"><col width="124"><col width="54"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO
| | | | | Server error | | | | Soft 404 | | | | Access denied | | Not found | | | Not followed | | | |** I have many of these errors, is it harming SEO?Yoseph0 -
Google not found errors in webmaster tool help
Hi, Google Webmaster tools sent me a few messages recently about the jump in the number of 'not found' errors. From 0 to 290 errors, ouch. I know what it's from but I think Google is seeing things. We developed another page/subdomain we're working on with links back to the root domain. Basically a complete list of articles page that lists each article and links back to the root domain. Not sure what Google is crawling but the links that would result in a 'not found' error aren't there. Will these disappear over time? Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | astahl110 -
404 appearing in Sitelinks
I am little embarresed to say that the custom 404 page is appearing in a client's Sitelinks for their brand name search term. I have demoted this page from Sitelinks for the brand term but it still appears 😞 What is the best practise for a custom 404 page appearing in a sitemap and/or being blocked by robots.txt? Thanks
Technical SEO | | mccormackmorrison0 -
Seek help correcting large number of 404 errors generated, 95% traffic halt
Hi, The following GWT screen tells a bit of the story: site: http://bit.ly/mrgdD0 http://www.diigo.com/item/image/1dbpl/wrbp On about Feb 8 I decided to fix a large number of 'duplicate title' warnings being reported in GWT "HTML Suggestions" -- these were for URLs which differed only in parameter case, and which had Canonical tags, but were still reported as dups in GWT. My traffic had been steady at about 1000 clicks/day. At midnight on 2/10, google traffic completely halted, down to 11 clicks/day. I submitted a recon request and was told 'no manual penalty' Also, the 'sitemap' indexes in GWT showed 'pending' for 24x7 starting then. By about the 18th, the 'duplicate titles' count dropped to about 600 or so... the next day traffic hopped right back to about 800 clicks/day - for a week - then stopped again, down to 10/day, a week later, on the 26th. I then noticed that GWT was reporting 20K page-not found errors - this has now grown to 35K such errors! I realized that bogus internal links were being generated as I failed to disable the PHP warning messages.... so I disabled PHP warnings and fixed what I thought was the source of the errors. However, the not-found count continues to climb -- and I don't know where these bad internal links are coming from, because the GWT report lists these link sources as 'unavailable'. I'v been through a similar problem last year and it took months (4) for google to digest all the bogus pages ad recover. If I have to wait that long again I will lose much $$. Assuming that the large number of 404 internal errors is the reason for the sudden shutoff... How can I a) verify the source of these internal links, given that google says the source pages are 'unavailable'.. Most critically, how can I do a 'RESET" and have google re-spider my site -- or block the signature of these URLs in order to get rid of these errors ASAP?? thanks
Technical SEO | | mantucket0 -
Most Common Errors & Warnings
Hello there, i would like to ask some basic tips.. regarding found common errors & Warnings. list : Tittle Element Too Long
Technical SEO | | Bretly
Duplicate Page Content
and Duplicate Page Tittle. how could i fixed this one? any help would be greatly appreciated regards,0 -
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