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.
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 ...
12
votes
5answers
10k views
Why am I seeing unexpected requests for “crossdomain.xml” in my logs?
I've getting lots of 404 errors from crossdomain.xml. Here are the request details, as provided by Google App Engine:
404 22ms 19cpu_ms 0kb Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534.30 ...
10
votes
2answers
2k views
Is it better to have an ErrorDocument 404 redirect back to the homepage or a standard 404 error page?
We run an ecommerce site that was setup by a third party ecommerce software provider, basic shop with product pages, basket and checkout.
The third party vendor set up the htaccess file so that if a ...
10
votes
4answers
724 views
ecommerce item deleted by user, 301 rediret to HOME PAGE or 404 not found?
I know this question is someway similar to this one where they reccomend using 404, but after reading this other one where they suggest to use 301 when changing site urls (in the specific case was due ...
9
votes
1answer
233 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 ...
8
votes
4answers
142 views
Can missing anchors be logged?
If I have a broken link it gets logged with a 404. If I have a link to an anchor and the anchor is missing, I don't get an entry in the log. How can I find those broken anchor links, especially if the ...
8
votes
1answer
159 views
Importance of custom 404 pages?
I've read in a few design blogs that its important to design custom 404 pages, but why is this?
Dont most users know what these are as you tend to end up seeing them from time to time. Also, if your ...
7
votes
1answer
399 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 ...
6
votes
2answers
224 views
serious 404 problem, suggestions for hunting them all down
I have a bit of a situation coming up. Due to a complete website structure redesign that is basically inevitable, I expect to have the following:
Our sitemap of about 12,000 url's have about 90-95% ...
6
votes
2answers
1k views
Chrome causing 404's ending with “/cache/[hex-string]/”?
Since the last weeks we see many 404's on our sites caused by Chrome adding /cache/[hex-string]/ to the current page URL.
The hex strings we have seen are:
e9c5ecc3f9d7fa1291240700c8da0728
...
5
votes
3answers
784 views
Does it make sense to return a 410 instead of 404 when some page has been permanently removed?
Does it make sense to return a 410 instead of 404 when some page has been permanently removed? In this video, Matt Cutts says that Google treats them the same, but are there other reasons to implement ...
5
votes
4answers
398 views
404 page echoing request URI - security risk?
I just noticed the default 404 page on one of my hosting accounts displays the requested URI.
<!--#echo var="REQUEST_URI" -->
I faintly remember hearing or reading that this is a potential ...
5
votes
3answers
5k views
Why am I seeing 404 requests for crossdomain.xml in my server logs?
My website is recording a lot of 404 errors, from numerous sources, for a file crossdomain.xml. Does anyone know what this file is or why it's being requested?
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 ...
4
votes
4answers
2k views
404 page needs meta description (just to make Google happier)?
I'm fixing some minor things on the 404 page for all my websites.
My punctiliousness makes me unable to sleep well unless I get an answer to this question. :)
Does a 404 page need a meta description ...
4
votes
2answers
251 views
Just discovered something I never knew about 404 - could someone explain this
I had always thought that placing anything spurious after the 404 which the server didn't understand would result in a 404; however I had a closer look at a WordPress site which I was building and ...
4
votes
2answers
179 views
Are you aware of any client-side malware that sends lots of junk requests for .gifs?
I am getting dozens of 404 errors on my site that are requests for gif's with apparently random names, like 4273uaqa.gif and 5pwowlag.gif.
I see that most of them are coming from one user. I assume ...
4
votes
1answer
94 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 ...
4
votes
1answer
82 views
Serve 404 error, if typing not exact URL
At the moment, when I type:
xyz.lo/abc.php/123
in my webbrowser, Apache serves the same page if I were typing
xyz.lo/abc.php
Unfortunatelly relative links present in HTML won't work with the ...
4
votes
1answer
239 views
What is the notified-CompliancePage page?
I sometimes have bots (I assume) hitting pages such as:
/notified-CompliancePage?aHR0cDovL3d3dy5teXBpdm90cy5jb20vZGFpbHlub3Rlcw==
...
4
votes
1answer
287 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:
...
4
votes
1answer
212 views
Undefined 404's not logging
Our custom 404 page sends us Emails to notify us of broken links. We've been lately getting emails with such a missing page:
http://domain.com/undefined
However, no log entries (IIS) exist on that ...
4
votes
1answer
242 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 ...
3
votes
3answers
481 views
Why can't GoogleBot forget a 404 File Does Not Exist?
For two months now, googlebot is trying to get a file which does not exist anymore. This is just one example out of many: I had renamed the file to a better name and removed the old file. Now, why ...
3
votes
3answers
203 views
SEO (or other) problems with a 404?
I am a member of a writing website called HubPages. We are each given a subdomain on which to write articles and are also given access to Google Webmaster Tools for our subdomain.
Upon checking out ...
3
votes
1answer
226 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.
...
3
votes
1answer
149 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 ...
3
votes
1answer
554 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?
3
votes
2answers
1k views
How can I stop 404s from favicon.ico without a favicon.ico?
How can I stop requests for favicon.ico without having a favicon.ico? It wastes resources serving a 404 and fills up logs with 404s. Right now I put in a dummy favicon.ico file but I would prefer a ...
3
votes
5answers
2k views
Thousands of 404 errors in Google Webmaster Tools
Because of a former error in our ASP.Net application, created by my predecessor and undiscovered for a long time, thousands of wrong URLs where created dynamically. The normal user did not notice it, ...
3
votes
1answer
229 views
Google Webmasters Tools strange 404 errors referred from same site
Starting about a month ago, I noticed a sudden increase in 404 errors in Webmasters Tools for one of my sites (over 1400 errors so far). All the errors are being referred from my own site to non ...
3
votes
1answer
71 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
284 views
How to interpret number of URL errors in Google webmaster tools
Recently Google has made some changes to Webmaster tools which are explained below:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/crawl-errors-next-generation.html
One thing I could not find out ...
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 ...
2
votes
2answers
83 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 (eg example.com/thisisnon-existant.htm) but instead it's ...
2
votes
3answers
203 views
Google Webmasters tools crawl error caused by URL split into two lines
I am looking in to Google Webmaster Tools - Crawl Error section.
How should I handle for those URL due their system / application showed invalid URL.
e.g
...
2
votes
3answers
539 views
is it google webmaster crawler's fault or a virus?
Last day when i visited google webmaster tools, i found crawler errors for 42 not found pages. all the pages were having "luminous-solutions.net" at last in the URL. Like
...
2
votes
3answers
165 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:
...
2
votes
1answer
60 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
2answers
38 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
46 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 ...
2
votes
3answers
297 views
Google Webmaster Tools reporting crawl error 404 (Not found) for a page which has never existed
Google Webmaster Tools is reporting a crawl error "404 (Not Found)" for an .html page which has never existed on a web site I developed. The page being reported is "tyuiabmog.html", which doesn't ...
2
votes
1answer
136 views
What's the extent of the “damage” to having a broken URL found by the spiders (showing in Google Webmaster Tools)?
An error with our URL rewrite rules caused some pages to be not found (404 errors) when Google crawled our site.
I regularly watch for errors and fix database or coding issues when they arise. We ...
2
votes
1answer
96 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.
...
2
votes
1answer
150 views
Edit robots.txt on google sites
Getting many 404 errors on my website for the following URLs:
/system/app/pages/admin/revisions*
I was going to put Disallow in robots.txt, but it seems there is no way to edit robots.txt in google ...
2
votes
1answer
976 views
Why does BingBot add “ForceRecrawl: 0” to URLs when crawling my sites?
I'm seeing this in the iis-logs of two websites that I maintain:
GET /an/existing/page/on/my/site+ForceRecrawl:+0 - 80 - 207.46.195.105 HTTP/1.1 ...
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
62 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
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:
...
2
votes
2answers
208 views
Tool to generate list of redirections (sitemap for .htaccess)
Is there any good tool (preferably for Ubuntu), that can help me generate a list of URLs used on a site?
I'm building new version of some site, but I don't want to get 404 errors for the old pages. ...
