My 404 page is returning a 404
-
Hi there,
Moz has highlighted that my 404 page is returning a 404... Looking at webmaster tools within crawl errors, it's the same story.
The only big change on the website is that we recently moved to https for the entire site, so all pages have a 301 to the corresponding https page, including the old 404 http page. I don't know if that makes any difference?
Any help or advice on how I reasolve this will be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Stuart
-
You need to look at the CSV version of your Moz crawl. It will show what pages link to it.
-
Good question, do you know what I can do to find out?
Stuart
-
How is http://domain.com/404 being found? You should not have any links to that page to start with.
P
-
Many thanks for the info.
It seems the linking page is the http://domain.com/404 page which has a 301 to the new https://domain.com/404 page
An issue?
Stuart
-
If Moz crawl is showing that it is finding your 404 page and it is showing a 404 response, that is good as this is what your 404 page is supposes to show. What you need to see (and you need to download the CSV version of the report in Moz for this) is what page(s) are pointing to the 404 page? Figure out if you need to have the links removed or updated or you possibly need to redirect them.
Search console 404s are different as Google may be finding those pages from other websites linking to yours. If there are old pages that are supposed to 404 then that is ok. Let them 404 and they will eventually go away in Search Console. If the pages are not supposed to 404 then you setup a 301 redirect etc.
-
Without the actual url it's difficult to give a very precise answer. You could check if your 404 page exist (check the status of the 404 page in http & https using web-sniffer.net). You could check if it's the correct 404 that is shown (just type yourdomain.com/jfjkldgjlkfdj or something like that & see where it brings you) - if not - probably there is something wrong with your config;
rgds,
Dirk
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
-
Paginated pages are being indexed?
I have lots of paginated pages which are being indexed. Should I add the noindex tag to page 2 onwards? The pages currently have previous and next tags in place. Page one also has a self-referencing canonical.
Technical SEO | | WTH0 -
Titling Category Pages Like You Would a Blog Page?
So, with our 600 or so category pages, I was curious... on each of these category pages we show the top 12 products for that category. In trying to increase click through rate, I wonder if it would be prudent to use some of the strategies I see used for Blog posts with thee category pages. i.e. Instead of Category Name - Website Name How about: Top 12 Kitty Litters We Carry - View the Best and the Rest! Or something like that. And then in the description, I could put, "Number 8 made my jaw drop!!!" (Ok, kidding about that one...) But serious about the initial question... Thanks! Craig
Technical SEO | | TheCraig0 -
Why are only a few of our pages being indexed
Recently rebuilt a site for an auctioneers, however it has a problem in that none of the lots and auctions are being indexed by Google on the new site, only the pages like About, FAQ, home, contact. Checking WMT shows that Google has crawled all the pages, and I've done a "Fetch as Google" on them and it loads up fine, so there's no crawling issues that is standing out. I've set the "URL Parameters" to no effect too. Also built a sitemap with all the lots in, pushed to Google which then crawled them all (massive spike in Crawl rate for a couple days), and still just indexing a handful of pages. Any clues to look into would be greatly appreciated. https://www.wilkinsons-auctioneers.co.uk/auctions/
Technical SEO | | Blue-shark0 -
Too Many Page Links
I have 8 niche websites for golf clubs. This was done to carve out tight niches for specific types of clubs then only broadens each club by type - i.e. better player, game improvement, max game improvement. So far, for fairly young sites, <1 year, they are doing fairly well as I build content. Running campaigns has alerted me to one problem - too many on-page links. And because I use Wordpress those links are on each page in the right sidebar and lead to the other sites. Even though visitors arrive via organic search in most cases they tend to eventually exit to one of the other sites or they click on a product (Ebay) and venture off to hopefully make a purchase. Ex: Drivers site will have a picture link for each of the other 7 sites. Question: If I have one stie (like a splash page) used as one link to that page listing all the sites with a brief explanation of each site will this cause visitors to bounce off because they will have one click, than the list and other clicks depending on what other club/site they would like to go to. The links all open in new windows. This would cut down on the number of links per page of each site but will it cause too much work for visitors and cause them to leave?
Technical SEO | | NicheGuy0 -
Duplicates on the page
Hello SEOMOZ, I've one big question about one project. We have a page http://eb5info.com/eb5-attorneys and a lot of other similar pages. And we got a big list of errors, warnings saying that we have duplicate pages. But in real not all of them are same, they have small differences. For example - you select "State" in the left sidebar and you see a list on the right. List on the right panel is changing depending on the what you selecting on the left. But on report pages marked as duplicates. Maybe you can give some advices how to improve quality of the pages and make SEO better? Thanks Igor
Technical SEO | | usadvisors0 -
Is it bad to have your pages as .php pages?
Hello everyone, Is it bad to have your website pages indexed as .php? For example, the contact page is site.com/contact.php and not /contact. Does this affect your SEO rankings in any way? Is it better to have your pages without the extension? Also, if I'm working with a news site and the urls are dynamic for every article (ie site.com/articleid=2323.) Should I change all of those dynamic urls to static? Thank You.
Technical SEO | | BruLee0 -
Dynamic page
I have few pages on my site that are with this nature /locator/find?radius=60&zip=&state=FL I read at Google webmaster that they suggest not to change URL's like this "According to Google's Blog (link below) they are able to crawl the simplified dynamic URL just fine, and it is even encouraged to use a simple dynamic URL ( " It's much safer to serve us the original dynamic URL and let us handle the problem of detecting and avoiding problematic parameters. " ) _http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html _It can also actually lead to a decrease as per this line: " We might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URLs if you try to make your urls look static and in the process hide parameters which offer the Googlebot valuable information. "The URLs are already simplified without any extra parameters, which is the recommended structure from Google:"Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
Technical SEO | | ciznerguy
That's our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems" I would love to get some opinions on this also please consider that those pages are not cached by Google for some reason.0 -
Product category paging
Hi, My product categories have 2-3 pages each. I have paging implemented with rel=next and rel=prev. from some reason Google GWT now reports the pages as having duplicate titles and description. Should I be worried? Should I set a different title like "blue category - page x" ? Thanx, Asaf
Technical SEO | | AsafY0