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
-
Hubspot (Primary CMS) and WordPress Blog on Subfolder?
We are thinking about transitioning a WordPress blog from a subdomain to subfolder on our main root domain that is run on Hubspot. Is there anything that we need to be aware of? In my mind, it should be a simply as creating the WordPress instance on a subfolder and then importing everything in and then setting up 301 redirects. Has anyone done this before? I ask because our product managers would like to continue to update their blogs within the WordPress environment rather than transition over to Hubspot. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s1jkirkpatrick0 -
AMP for WordPress: To Do Or Not To Do
Hello SEO's, Recently some of my VIPs (Very Important Pages) have slipped, and all the pages above them are AMP. I've been waiting to switch to AMP for as long as possible bc I've heard it's a very mixed bag. As of Oct 2018, what do people think? Is it worth doing? Is there a preferred plugin for wordpress? Are things more likely to go right than wrong? The page that has gotten hit the hardest is https://humanfoodbar.com/plant-paradox-diet/plant-paradox-diet-full-shopping-list-for-lectin-free-diet/. It used to bring in ~70% of organic traffic. It was #1 and is now often near the bottom of the page. 😞 Thanks all! Remy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | remytennant1 -
Does changing template for a wordpress site affect SEO
Hi I work for an Inventory Management Software company and we already have a WordPress site but I am currently working on re-designing of our WordPress site and in this process, we are looking for moving to a new template. I want to know what will be the impact on SEO performance while taking a shift to a new template.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cin7_Marketing0 -
Category 404 Error in Wordpress | Help!!!
Hello Gurus hope everyone is having a fantastic day. Right so I've been pulling my hair with this 404 error on links as such: htttp://manvanlondon.co.uk/category/clients/removals/man-and-van-wandsworth This link appears in the category page clients and the /removals/man-and-van-wandsworth part is the link that should take the user on the Man and Van Wandsworth page in the/ from the footer. However this link and all other links in the footer on these category pages/posts appear to be broken ONLY on this category pages, thus creating 404 errors. And those pages(i.e man and van Wandsworth) are not even categorized. The website is www.manvanlondon.co.uk . We tried various things on Wordpress and nothing is working including non-indexing. Has anyone met this problem before? Is there a way to fix it? Thank you for your time, and hope my explanations make sens. Monica
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monicapopa0 -
Custom Google Search & Joomla/Wordpress
If you install google custom search on a site - does it record a list of all the searches people type into the search box? Is there a Joomla & Wordpress Search plugin/extension that keeps a track of the search history used on your site(s).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Are 17000+ Not Found (404) Pages OK?
Very soon, our website will go a rapid change which would result in us removing 95% or more old pages (Right now, our site has around 18000 pages indexed). It's changing into something different (B2B from B2C) and hence our site design, content etc would change. Even our blog section would have more than 90% of the content removed. What would be the ideal scenario be? Remove all pages and let those links be 404 pages Remove all pages and 301 redirect them to the home page Remove all unwanted pages and 301 redirect them to a separate page explaining the change (Although it wouldn't be that relevant since our audience has completely changed)- I doubt it would be ideal since at some point, we'd need ot remove this page as well and again do another redirection
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jombay0 -
Wordpress site architecture conflicts and how to go about fixing them
I am attempting to figure something out with a site I'm trying to fix. So the problem is that I've got two categories that are basically related keywords. I set this up when I first started doing this work and didn't know what I was doing. So that site at one time was ranking on the first page for a specific term (example: 'project manager salary' and posted in the category 'project manager salary'. But they we added 'project manager salary in Vermont' and all other 50 posts for all states in a different category called, 'project manager salaries and benefits'. So my question is this: Would this cause some kind of keyword rank cannibalization? How do I fix this properly? Thanks! Michael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtking.us_gmail.com0 -
Optimizing the HomePage of a WordPress blog
Dearest SEOmozzers, I am creating WordPress blogs and I would like to know from a WordPress expert how to better optimize the homepage of a site. In particular, I'd like to know how to create an SEO-friendly homepage that I want to optimize for certain keywords. Do you think that it is better to show on the homepage the posts that I write, which change constantly, or a static, well-optimized text that will include the keywords I want to rank for? I have been naively using the changing posts, but after an analysis of the competitors I have noticed that most of them use a static text and show only the most recent post at the bottom of the page. I'd really appreciate it if you could let me know the best practice to adopt to optimize the site. Thank you. Sal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0