The 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server, but the server could not find what was requested.
2
votes
2answers
91 views
404 page not showing URL
My 404 page (/404.php) works, it's sending the proper headers (404 - Not found).
But the thing is, it's not giving the link that caused it (e.g. example.com/thisisnon-existant.htm) but instead it's ...
3
votes
1answer
67 views
Soft 404 error on redirected outbound links
I have a redirect script on my site which sends visitors to an affiliate site. However in the last month I've noticed that Google webmaster tools is reporting my outbound links as a 404 error. Here is ...
2
votes
2answers
171 views
Send 404 Status Code on www.example.com
Does anyone know if it's at all possible (preferably with .htaccess), to send a 404 error code and page when visiting http://www.example.com but have http://example.com working just fine?
I want to ...
1
vote
1answer
43 views
Should 404 pages feature in your sitemap.xml
I tend to generate the sitemaps for my static sites (no CMS) by using a service such as xml-sitemaps.com. They way this works if you input your homepage and it crawls all the internal links of a site ...
1
vote
1answer
28 views
Should I use a 404 or a 403 error for secure content
I have a set of content in my web app that should only be visible if you are logged in. They have not public equivalent, should never be crawled, or otherwise known outside of logged in users of ...
0
votes
2answers
166 views
GWT: reporting crawling errors for non existing links
Google Webmaster Tools is reporting crawl errors for links that never existed, and if i check the "Linked from" tab for a given error link, it shows another that never existed.
They all mention ...
9
votes
1answer
241 views
Clients requesting garbled URLs
I've noticed some odd 404s which appear to be broken URL rewriting code. Our image viewer requests tiles using URLs like this:
/media/204/service/dzi/1/1_files/7/0_0.jpg
I see some - well under ...
1
vote
1answer
42 views
Website starts showing 404 after 301 redirects via .htaccess
One of my clients websites started getting 404 messages on some pages after doing 301 redirects via .htaccess file. I don't understand why that happens, could someone tell me what went wrong?
The ...
5
votes
2answers
261 views
New requests for /cache/ URLs
A few weeks ago requests following this type of pattern:
http://mysite/cache/7a226e8aa3a4380444a329a7b0dd0f40
http://mysite/otherfolder/cache/7a226e8aa3a4380444a329a7b0dd0f40
started to appear ...
0
votes
1answer
65 views
Is there any way to prevent Googlebar from breaking Friendly 404s
This might be considered a continuation of this question.
If I output HTML after my 404 header, It displays properly in IE and FF unless the user has Google bar instaled.
If I try
header('HTTP/1.x ...
1
vote
1answer
45 views
Webmaster tools reports fake 404 errors
I have a website where Google Webmaster Tools reports 15,000 links as 404 errors. However, all links return a 200 when I visit them. The problem is, that eventhough I can visit these pages and return ...
0
votes
0answers
19 views
Does 404 Not Found effect your SEO Rankings [duplicate]
I have a question about 404 errors and SEO; I am looking to create the right solution to avoid the errors that Google Webmaster Tools is giving me.
My web site has real estate listings and the homes ...
1
vote
6answers
1k views
Will 404 errors affect search engine ranking?
I had installed joomla in my domain with the sample data. I now removed it and installed wordpress in my domain. There are a lot of 404 errors in my domain. Will they affect my search engine rankings. ...
0
votes
1answer
111 views
How to fix this 404 soft error?
I have a static HTML website.
www.example.com/?12345 (this page doesn't exist) redirects to www.example.com and www.example.com/page.html?12345 redirects to www.example.com/page.html. I don't know ...
2
votes
3answers
58 views
Google Webmaster Tools keeps reporting not finding pages from the old website
About 3 months ago we've completely replaced the content of our domain, practically building up a new website. The sitemap for the new website has been submited to Google Webmaster Tools, the website ...
3
votes
1answer
234 views
SEO effect of redirecting to 404 page
In a dynamically generated site (PHP, Python, pick your poison), 404 pages are normally handled dynamically to simply send a 404 header and display some error page on the URL that the user visited.
...
0
votes
1answer
63 views
404 errors How to deal with a large number of broken internal links for SEO
I have recently updated my website. In fact I have completely rewritten it using
wordpress. It was originally constructed using ASP.
In the process, I have recycled a a large amount of my original ...
5
votes
1answer
1k views
.htaccess rule to redirect from 404 to search results
When a user (or a bot) request on non existing page, I want to redirect him to the search results. I prefere to do it with the .htaccess file using something like:
ErrorDocument 404 ...
3
votes
1answer
454 views
“404. That’s an error.” when viewing from Google cache
My site is getting 404. That’s an error. message when I click on cached from Google search results.
This is the error message from Google:
That’s an error.
The requested URL ...
1
vote
1answer
43 views
Separate 404 page for subdirectory
I've made a subsite which runs under mydomain.com/subsite - idealy from an architecture point of view it would be under a subdomain, but we wanted the links to come back to the main domain.
The sub ...
2
votes
2answers
129 views
Large increase in 404 hits
We're running a Magento shop and we experienced a significant raise in 404 hits lately, almost 40,000 in one day. Most of the pages are old ones that once existed but don't anymore, and there are some ...
2
votes
1answer
64 views
how to stop other sites linking non available urls to our site which leads to 404
I check webmastertools for 404's.
I can see other sites linking to my site but with additional characters which makes the link a 404 in my site.
for example
if i have a url like ...
2
votes
1answer
71 views
Why are perfectly legitimate pages on my website registering in Google Webmasters as 404?
I have seen this question asked several times here, but never clearly answered.
I suspect it has something to do with my .htaccess file:
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
...
2
votes
3answers
181 views
Why are URLs with my domain name at the end showing up in analytics?
I have a multi-language WordPress site that has been live since the last 3 months and today when I checked Analytics, I saw a lot of weird URLs:
...
1
vote
2answers
142 views
Will 301 redirection to a Google Indexed URL can remove the URL from Google index?
I need to remove some indexed URLs from Google SERP. The problem is I cannot use the 3 types of removal patterns Google suggests like robots.txt, meta name "noindex" and remove the page and make it as ...
0
votes
0answers
27 views
What is a good bounce rate for a 404 page? [closed]
I checked the stats of my 404 page today and realized that visitors who land on my 404 page have almost exactly the same level of engagement as the average visitor that hits my site. My 404 page is ...
0
votes
1answer
39 views
Consequence of redirecting ALL 404s on a site
I've just gone through my sites 404 list and redirected all of them to the front page.
There were in general 2 categories of links. The first was relative links of client sites which we may have ...
1
vote
1answer
205 views
Remove directory from Google SE results
I was developing a Joomla site in /new/ which was to replace the Mambo site in the root directory. I thought I put a robots file there to stop bots from crawling the new site, but this is not the ...
1
vote
0answers
93 views
MVC4 App opens with directory listing and gives a 404 for any direct URL's entered in the browser
I've just deployed a previously (on my local IIS) working MVC4 app to IIS 7.5 on the dev server. After tweaking this and that - one knows how these things get forgotten - the app finally launches, but ...
2
votes
1answer
26 views
HTTPS Causes Broken Back Links?
If I change my URL to force https does this effect all of my backlinks to be broken and to be lost one by one? And if so if I change it back will it will this restore the back links on the site? Any ...
2
votes
1answer
129 views
IIS 7.5 site is stopped, but it still responds to requests with 404 errors
What you'd expect when you select a site in the IIS console and choose the "stop" button is that all bound ports would stop responding, right? That's what it did in earlier versions of IIS, at least.
...
7
votes
1answer
407 views
Meaning of Crawl errors
My question is about definition of Crawl errors in Google Webmaster Tools. Crawl errors is devided into few sections.
Let's first consider HTTP section.
I assume that all broken links in this ...
1
vote
4answers
747 views
Why is Joomla based website that was copied off of live server into localhost not showing pictures and throwing 404 error?
I have copied Joomla based website via FTP onto my machine and I am trying to make it run on my localhost which is provided by the latest version of XAMPP. I have exported and imported the DB with no ...
2
votes
2answers
41 views
Returning 404 for expired jobs in my jobs site [duplicate]
In my new Job search site how should I handle jobs which are expired?
Ideally those should return 410 response when deleted. But I'd like to delete them(404 response) since that'd be easy to do for ...
2
votes
2answers
49 views
SEO handling of ever changing portion of site
A portion of a site that I maintain lists job opportunities available within an organization. The opportunities are listed on a single page with a short description which can be clicked on by the user ...
0
votes
0answers
19 views
Over 400 old 404 errors, safe to remove? [duplicate]
I have over 400 old 404 errors showing up in Google web-masters tools, the date on them is from before I uploaded the new sitemap and I wondered 2 things:
Why are they still showing up
Can i remove ...
4
votes
1answer
294 views
How should incorrectly encoded URLs be handled?
Just recently noticed that some sites link with the URL incorrectly percent-encoded, to which my server (LAMP) responds with a 404 Not Found.
For example, for a URL of mine like this:
...
0
votes
0answers
41 views
Google Webmasters showing 404's but header check showing 200 All Good
I have just been marking them as fixed, but they just keep coming back and I don't want to have to keep coming back to mark as fixed. Google is showing about 150 of my pages as 404's but they all ...
2
votes
3answers
117 views
What is the best way to deal with 404s that are all trying to point to the same page that are from an external site?
I started getting 404s showing up in my Google Webmaster's Tools from a site linking to a specific category but with odd characters at the end of the URL. So Something like this:
...
1
vote
1answer
832 views
Internal WordPress pages all 404 when using WAMP
I have a problem when using WAMP while designing and coding my site.
Well, I have a local version of Wordpress installed in WAMP and use it as a tool to see my changes when coding. I also have the ...
3
votes
1answer
74 views
Need help with 200,000 + 404's
The business I work for recently migrated our e-commerce site from Celerant to Magento. Despite using a robots.txt file and a 301 redirect extension, webmaster tools is reporting that our "not found" ...
3
votes
1answer
56 views
Will moving a WordPress from one location to another result in broken links
I am having a WordPress installed at www.mydomain.com/blog/wordpress/
I am planning to move it to www.mydomain.com/blog/
Will this cause any 404 broken links? This question may seem stupid but please ...
1
vote
0answers
111 views
htaccess returning 404 errors on some URLS on website
I have a .htaccess file on my main directory on my website, which basically allows pretty urls (example.com/index instead of example.com/index.html) and it will redirect to a pretty url if someone ...
1
vote
1answer
93 views
www.domain.com loads, but domain.com loads as an error on my WP multi-site network
I'm running an up-to-date version of a WP multi-site network successfully (homepage and subdomains all work), with only one problem.
My domain loads perfectly with the www., but when the www. isn't ...
24
votes
2answers
2k views
Files I should have on every website
I would like to have a list of files that should exist on every website. The idea is to please most browsers and bots and get down with the number of 404 messages in the logs.
So far I have the ...
4
votes
1answer
100 views
What Google will do while switching from 301/404 to 200?
Imagine a pagination script with 20 total pages:
articles.php?page=18
What should I do when some third party web site links to a non-existent page?
articles.php?page=21 (page 21 is out of ...
3
votes
1answer
724 views
How to redirect specific url to 404 in htaccess?
I want to redirect only one specific URl (ex. mypage.com/1234/page/) to error page 404.
How to achieve it in htaccess?
1
vote
0answers
123 views
Site returning 404 header to google, not sure why
A Drupal site that works fine for regular users returns a 404 not found error when I try to use the W3C validator on it; it is also not being indexed by google at all (which is the main issue but I ...
1
vote
3answers
381 views
Weird 404 crawl errors in Google webmaster tools
If anyone can help, I'd be very grateful! We're getting strange domains coming up in Google webmaster tools - they seem to be breeding. When I look where the links are coming from, it's either:
...
1
vote
1answer
1k views
.htaccess - if not exist, rewrite to index.php but send 404 instead of 200
I have a catchall .htaccess directive like this:
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [L]
Anything that doesn't exist and the url is ...
