Wordpress No 404
-
Hello,
My issue is that in wordpress 404 does not seem to be working properly.
An example of this is:
sitename.com/category/catname loads the files in that category but I can also type
sitename.com/category/asdasfaasd/catname and it still goes to the posts in that category and does not 404. I can replace the misc text with anything and it does not 404.
My worry is that this can be used to exploit duplicate content.
I've looked at a couple of other sites and they do the same.
I'm using Yoast as my SEO plugin and my theme is elogix from themeforest.
I've tried disabling all plugins, cloudflare and changing theme and the same issue exists.
If anyone can help it would be extremely appreciated.
-
Hi Paul,
Will do. I forgot to mention but I actually found the flaw with the 404 when I was looking at the SEOmoz crawler statistics. It said that my sub categories were duplicate content as the pages it was referring to were assigned to multiple categories.
An example roughly based on my structure that it detected as duplicate content is the posts existing in: /category/seo/no1 and /category/seo/no2 so as a result it was duplicate content. I deleted the sub categories and assigned them all to just the SEO category and realised that the sub categories were still resolving so to troubleshoot this I decided to add a random prefix to the end e.g. /seo/asdnas and the address still resolved to the root category.
My theory was that if someone generated for example 100 urls and built links that google would see it as 100 duplicate pages due to the fact it was not 404ing or changing url when as you said 301ing.
I will close the thread and mark your question as good answer.
Cheers.
-
Hmmm... you should be seeing the URL change in the browser's address bar after the redirect pushes to the corrected URL, Luke. I certainly do in my installs that I confirmed it with.
At any rate, if this answered your question fully, would be a good idea to mark the question as "Answered" to help other users. I'd also love a mark as "Good Answer if you found it valuable.
And yea, absolutely - something new to learn every day. That's what I love about this business I only remember seeing this correction functionality mentioned once in passing in some documentation, but I couldn't find it by search even though i knew what I was looking for. So no wonder you couldn't scrounge it up.
Paul
-
Hi Paul,
Thanks for clearing that up for me!. When I was playing with it I was extremely confused as normally 301 actually redirects and shows the new URL.
As a temporary solution I ended up stripping the category base meaning it now 404s or 301s to the correct page if you try any of the things I originally mentioned.
I actually did a fair bit of research on it prior to asking on SEOmoz and could not find anything at all about it. I even asked a couple of web developers I know who use Joomla and Drupal and they could not figure it out either.
You clearly do learn something new every day as I had no idea about this prior to your reply.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my question and clearing it up for me, it's appreciated,
Luke
-
WordPress has this error-correction functionality built-in, Luke.
If you user a server header checking tool on that non-existent URL, you'll see that WP is automatically using a 301-redirect to push the user to the correct address each time - so no duplicate content or split authority problems at all.
Paul
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
-
How can i recover from japanes keyword hack after wordpress clean up
I'm facing a big issue on my two blog legitloaded and asirimp3 months after I patch and clean up my WordPress and plugins, too... I still see the hacked site in google search that I have asked to delete, but I still see the same character and the hacked material in google. I don't know what to do, I'm confused. I try asking google to update my page, but I can't find the URL in the search console. when checking on google with URL: site:legitloaded.com tzj6XvF
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | frankbanny0 -
Productontology URLs are 404 erroring, are there alternatives to denote new schema categories?
Our team QA specialist recently noticing that the class identifier URLs via productontology are 404ing out saying that the "There is no Wikipedia article for (particular property)". They are even 404ing for productontology URLs that are examples on the productontology.com website! Example: http://www.productontology.org/id/Apple The 404 page says that the wiki entry for "Apple" doesn't exist (lol) Does anybody know what is going on with this website? This service was extremely helpful for creating additionalType categories for schema categories that don't exist on schema.org. Are there any alternatives to productontology now that these class identifier URLs are 404ing? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Wordpress sidebar dropdown url ?cat...number issue
Hi does anyone know how to fix wordpress sidebar dropdown url ?cat...number found this below, but still not sure the best way to fix https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-display-category-name-in-url-not-cat-number https://wordpress.org/support/topic/category-drop-down-menu-shows-wrong-permalink-structure-1 any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
Wordpress Blog in 2 languages. How to SEO or structure it?
Hi Moz community, I have got a wordpress blog currently in the spanish language. I want to create the same blog content but in english version. (manually translate it to english instead of using translation service such as Google Translate). How should i structure the blog for SEO? How will it work? Any structure markups i should know about? Any examples? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WayneRooney0 -
Yoast Wordpress SEO premium
As anyone installed Yoast Wordpress SEO premium. Love to ear some feedbacks. I have some problems on installations that i am trying to solve as i am not an expert on SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
Wordpress - Dynamic pages vs static pages
Hi, Our site has over 48,000 indexed links, with a good mix of pages, posts and dynamic pages. For the purposes of SEO and the recent talk of "fresh content" - would it be better to keep dynamic pages as they are or manually create static pages/ subpages. The one noticable downside with dynamic pages is that they arent picked up by any sitemap plugins, you need to manually create a separate sitemap just for these dynamic links. Any thoughts??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danialniazi1 -
Easy way to change wordpress category titles. Currently categories are appearing with the same title?!
I'm working on a wordpress adult dating review site and have started to set up categories for each of my main keywords. I have also started to add sub categories by county and town and so far have done so for the counties of 'Lincolnshire' and 'Derbyshire'. The problem is though that for each of my subcategories the page titles are appearing the same. For example: www.mysite.com/category/online-dating/lincolnshire/spalding (root category online dating) shows the title as 'Spalding'. www.mysite.com/category/adult-dating/lincolnshire/spalding also has the title 'Spalding' even though it's root category is different (adult dating). It's probably easier to go to http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com to see how it's set up. If you click in the category text in the top menu and navigate to dating/derbyshire/alfreton for example and then adult dating/derbyshire/alfreton you'll notice the page titles are the same. I use all in one SEO pack and have rewrite titles checked with category titles set to %category_title% | %blog_title%. I also use category SEO updater. In order to prevent duplicate content issues how can I simply make the title of each category category root title/category subtitle(county)/category subtitle 2(town). The title of each category page would then read for example Online Dating Lincolnshire Spalding.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
WordPress site and Forum in Sub domain
I have a web site www.mydirectoyzzz.com (Eg site) instaled wordpress and directory theme on that. i wanna add forum to this web site phpbb or similar .so how can i use forum in main domain .wanna know how it works best for SEO www.mydirectoyzzz.com/forum or www.forum.mydirectoyzzz.com ? Adding forum to main site .is that harmful to main web site ? Looking for SEO Expert help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innofidelity0