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
-
Need help related to SEO ?
Hi, Hope you guys are doing well! I need help from experts, I have a query that "Does google allows SEO for websites related to crypto currency ?" If yes, what is best way to do SEO for crypto currency website ?
Technical SEO | | JessicaThompson0 -
Crawl errors which ones should i sort out
Hi, just had my website updated to joomla 3.0 and i have around 4000 urls not found. now i have been told i need to redirect these but i would just like to check on here to make sure i am doing the right thing and the advice i have been given is not correct. I have been told these errors are the reason for the drop in rankings. I need to know if i should redirect all of these 4,000 urls or only the ones that are being linked to from outside of the site. I think about 3,000 of these have no links from outside of the site, but if i do not redirect them all then i am going to keep getting the error messages. around 2,000 of these url not found are from the last time we updated the site which was a couple of years ago and i thought they would have died off now. any advice on what i should do would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Types of SEO Help
I have a web site that is going well but I think it could be better as far as usability and design. Also, I am sure an SEO professional would have some things to do to optimize. It seems though, that all the SEO companies either want to have along term contract or they don't work with my technology. Does anyone know of a company that would take my Visual Studio/C# project and tweak it for usability, design and SEO features for an hourly or set price?
Technical SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Numerous 404 errors on crawl diagnostics (non existent pages)..
As new as them come to SEO so please be gentle.... I have a wordpress site setup for my photography business. Looking at my crawl diagnostics I see several 4xx (client error) alerts. These all show up to non existent pages on my site IE: | http://www.robertswanigan.com/happy-birthday-sara/109,97,105,108,116,111,58,104,116,116,112,58,47,47,109,97,105,108,116,111,58,105,110,102,111,64,114,111,98,101,114,116,115,119,97,110,105,103,97,110,46,99,111,109 | Totally lost on what could be causing this. Thanks in advance for any help!
Technical SEO | | Swanny8110 -
Nginx 403 and 503 errors
I have a client with a website that is hosted on a shared webserver running on an Nginx server. When I started working on the website a few months ago I found the server was throwing 100s of 403s and 503s and at one point googlebot couldn't access robots.txt. Needless to say this didn't help rankings! Now the web hosting company has partially resolved the errors by switching to a new server and I'm now just seeing intermittent spikes in Webmaster Tools of 30 to 70 403 ad 503 errors. My questions: Am I right in saying there should (pretty much) be no such errors (for pages that we make public and crawlable). Having already asked the web hosting company to look in to this. Any advice on specifically what I should be asking them to look at on the server? If this doesn't work out, does anyone having a recommendation for a reliable web hosting company in the U.S. for a lead generation website with over 20,000 pages and currently 500 to 1000 visits per day? Thanks for the help Mozzers 🙂
Technical SEO | | MatShepSEO0 -
Crawl Errors
Okay, I was just in my Google Webmaster Tools and was looking at some of the stats. I have 1354 "not found" pages google says. Many of these URL's are bizarre. I don't know what they are. Others I do know. What should I do about this? Especially all the URL's I don't even know what they are?
Technical SEO | | azguy0 -
404 erros on wordpress blog
Both SEOMOZ and Google webmaster tools report lots of 404 errors throughout my wordpress blog. I have the url structure set to category/title Most of the 404 errors seem to be that the crawler is looking for a /home.html page. Each time I add a new post I get more 404 errors. I could, of course, add 301 redirects but I presume there is an easy way to do this within the WP setup. Any ideas? Thanks
Technical SEO | | bjalc20110 -
301 Redirect NOT Working as Expected - HELP!
Hi! I just launched our newly coded site and just realized the installed 301 is NOT working. The URL string is the same EXCEPT for the removal of /shop/. Here is the code in .htaccess: ############################################ enable rewrites Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on #RedirectMatch 301 ^/shop?/$ http://hiphound.com/ RedirectMatch 301 ^/shop?/$ http://hiphound.com ########################################### When I go to Google and click on an old link I get a 404. No bueno!! Here is an example: http://hiphound.com/shop/rubit-dog-tag-clip I thought (and was told) that the installed 301 would send this page to: http://hiphound.com/rubit-dog-tag-clip It's not. Please HELP!! 🙂 What am I doing wrong??? Lynn
Technical SEO | | hiphound0