Sitemap issue? 404's & 500's are regenerating?
-
I am using the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast to generate a sitemap on http://www.atozqualityfencing.com. Last month, I had an associate create redirects for over 200 404 errors. She did this via the .htaccess file. Today, there are the same amount of 404s along with a number of 503 errors. This new Wordpress website was constructed on a subdirectory and made live by simply entering some code into the .htaccess file in order to direct browsers to the content we wanted live. In other words, the content actually resides in a subdirectory titled "newsite" but is shown live on the main url.
Can you tell me why we are having these 404 & 503 errors? I have no idea where to begin looking.
-
You likely have a .htaccess issue causing a rewrite error. You may want to examine or replace your .htaccess with a default. Also, I've seen some plugins cause this error.
What is happening is this:
http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/newsite
is sent to:
http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/newsite/
Note the trailing slash.
But that page is returning a 404 error.
If I go to
http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/newsite/index.php it redirects to
http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/newsite/
So there is likely something wrong in the redirect rules. I would try disabling all plugins. If that fails, compare the current htaccess to a default one and remove any modifications.
.
-
Wondering if anyone else out there has some insight as to whether the information in my previous post seems to be correct.
-
Oye, Jeff - this is a little bit over my head so bear with me as I work it through.
I went to redbot.org and entered the url of where the main website is actually living (http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/newsite). I received this information:
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Date: Sun, 24 Aug 2014 14:56:10 GMT Server: Apache Location: [http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/newsite/](https://redbot.org/?uri=http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/newsite/&req_hdr=Referer%3Ahttp://www.atozqualityfencing.com/newsite) Cache-Control: max-age=3600 Expires: Sun, 24 Aug 2014 15:56:10 GMT Content-Length: 326 Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 When I clicked on the url listed under Location above, I receive the following information:
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found Date: Sun, 24 Aug 2014 14:59:59 GMT Server: Apache X-Pingback: http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/newsite/xmlrpc.php Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0 Pragma: no-cache Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
This has me confused and I wondering if the method used for making the revised website is either not good or is missing something. Here are the articles that were followed for "moving" the newsite redesign to the live url. ``` [http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory](http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory) [http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress#When_Your_Domain_Name_or_URLs_Change](http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress#When_Your_Domain_Name_or_URLs_Change) ``` Can you provide any further assistance? Thanks, Janet ```
-
A 503 error is a service unavailable error. I have seen situations where redirects are incorrect and loop. Depending on the hosting setup, this can trigger various HTTP error codes.
The best way to debug this is by looking at your Apache access logs. Scan your logs for the 503 errors. Pay attention to the URL being requested as well as the referring URL.
Very likely, there's some looping process and in cases when Apache runs on FastCGI, you can get a 503 error due to too many processes being triggered.
Also, due to how WP handles 404's, I've seen many plugins mask underlying causes. So if you have any plugins that impact error handling, you may need to remove those while debugging.
You can also use http://www.redbot.org/ to check the headers for any page that should be redirected. That tool should return a Location header with a URL. Visit that Location URL in your browser and make sure it resolves.
The goal here is to try to replicate the behavior. Once you can replicate the behavior, dig into your redirect/rewrite rules and examine the logic to determine why you are seeing the loops or failures.
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
-
Changing URL structure of site, including AMP - redirect AMP too?
So, I'm changing all the URLs of a site, including all its AMP URLs, I'll be redirecting all the normal URLs, but do I need to also redirect all the AMP pages?
Technical SEO | | alksfjasldfu934341 -
Should I create a new site or keep company on parent company's subdomain?
I am working with a realty company that is hosted on a subdomain of the larger, parent realty company: [local realty company].[parent realty company].com How important is it to ride on the DA of the larger company (only about a 40)? I'm trying to weigh the value of creating an entirely separate domain for simplicity of the end user and Google bots: [local company].realtor They don't have any substantial links to their subdomain, so it wouldn't a huge loss. I have a couple options... Create an entirely new site on their current subdomain, leveraging the DA of the larger parent company. Create an entirely new site on a new URL, starting from scratch (which doesn't hurt you as much as it seems it once did). Create two sites, a micro site that targets a sector of their audience that they really want to reach, plus option (1) or (2). Love this community!
Technical SEO | | Gabe_BlueGuru0 -
My Homepage Won't Load if Javascript is Disabled. Is this an SEO/Indexation issue?
Hi everyone, I'm working with a client who recently had their site redesigned. I'm just going through to do an initial audit to make sure everything looks good. Part of my initial indexation audit goes through questions about how the site functions when you disable, javascript, cookies, and/or css. I use the Web Developer extension for Chrome to do this. I know, more recently, people have said that content loaded by Javascript will be indexed. I just want to make sure it's not hurting my clients SEO. http://americasinstantsigns.com/ Is it as simple as looking at Google's Cached URL? The URL is definitely being indexed and when looking at the text-only version everything appears to be in order. This may be an outdated question, but I just want to be sure! Thank you so much!
Technical SEO | | ccox10 -
Shortening URL's
Hello again Mozzers, I am debating what could be a fairly drastic change to the company website and I would appreciate your thoughts. The URL structure is currently as follows Product Pages
Technical SEO | | ATP
www.url.co.uk/product.html Category Pages
www.url.co.uk/products/category/subcategory.html I am debating removing the /products/ section as i feel it doesn't really add much and lengthens the url with a pointless word. This does mean however redirecting about 50-60 pages on the website, is this worth it? Would it do more damage than good? Am i just being a bit OCD and it wont really have an impact? As always, thanks for the input0 -
Changes to 'links to your site' in WebMaster Tools?
We're writing more out of curiosity... Clicking on "Download latest links" within 'Links to your site' in Google's WebMaster Tools would usually bring back links discovered recently. However, the last few times (for numerous accounts) it has brought back a lot of legacy links - some from 2011 - and includes nothing recent. We would usually expect to see a dozen at least each month. ...Has anyone else noticed this? Or, do you have any advice? Thanks in advance, Ant!
Technical SEO | | AbsoluteDesign0 -
We can't figure out why competitors have better position(s) in Google
We are using MOZ analytics for some days now, and it really helps us with important information about our rankings.
Technical SEO | | wilcoXXL
I hope you guys can help us out with the following particular case; In google.nl (dutch) we rank position #18 with the following searchterm 'sphinx 345' one of our competitors rank position #3.
We used the MOZ On Page Grade tool to find out some details about the two pages:
Our page #18: http://goo.gl/cTsbmI
Competitor page #3: http://goo.gl/qk21sM Our page hits an A and Keyword usage for "sphinx 345" = 52
The competitors page hits an A too and Keyword usage for "sphinx 345" = 45 About the link structure; for our page there is no link data found in Open Site Explorer. The url exists about a year and a half now.
I'm also very sure we have many internal links to this url.
Does Google and other crawlers have a hard time to crawl our site?(it's a Magento site, our competitors do have custom-made e-commerce systems, maybe that has something to do with it?) As i were saying;we can't figure this out. I hope you guys can help to get us any further. Regards, Wilco0 -
Strange URL's indexed
Hi, I got the message "Increase in not found errors" (404 errors) in GWT for one of my website. I did not change anything but I now see a lot of "strange" URL's indexed (~50) : &ui=2&tf=1&shva=1 &cat_id=6&tag_id=31&Remark=In %22%3EAny suggestion on how to fix it ?Erwan
Technical SEO | | johnny1220 -
Should we use Google's crawl delay setting?
We’ve been noticing a huge uptick in Google’s spidering lately, and along with it a notable worsening of render times. Yesterday, for example, Google spidered our site at a rate of 30:1 (google spider vs. organic traffic.) So in other words, for every organic page request, Google hits the site 30 times. Our render times have lengthened to an avg. of 2 seconds (and up to 2.5 seconds). Before this renewed interest Google has taken in us we were seeing closer to one second average render times, and often half of that. A year ago, the ratio of Spider to Organic was between 6:1 and 10:1. Is requesting a crawl-delay from Googlebot a viable option? Our goal would be only to reduce Googlebot traffic, and hopefully improve render times and organic traffic. Thanks, Trisha
Technical SEO | | lzhao0