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Google Console is telling me that I have a quite a few 404s on my site. For example, it tells me the following is a 404:

https://www.ThisIsMySite.com/accessories/0

There pages where it tells me I'm referencing this URL don't actually contain a reference to this URL! I do, however, have references to valid URLs such as:

https://www.ThisIsMySite.com/accessories/12345 https://www.ThisIsMySite.com/accessories/67890

Any ideas? What should I look for?

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  • When you say you have no references, how have you searched? Have you viewed the page source and used search (ctrl-f) to search for "/0"? Sometimes Googlebot looks in more than just links. Maybe you have a JavaScript string literal with that or a value of a select drop down. – Stephen Ostermiller♦ Jun 4 '18 at 19:30
  • Yes, I searched the page content like that. There is indeed a dropdown on the page with a possible value of zero. If that is the cause, how do I stop Google from trying to build a URL out of it? – ThisRestlessPilgrim Jun 5 '18 at 0:02
  • Google says that on the following page there is a broken link to this page – ThisRestlessPilgrim Jun 5 '18 at 0:04
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For each website, domain.com/"anything that doesn't exist on the website" returns a 404 error. So why Google just reports some random URLs as 404?

Because There's/there have been a link somewhere pointing to it.

You need to check the "linked from" tab where the 404s are reported.

  1. Click on each error entry.
  2. Navigate to "linked from" tab.
  3. Check the web pages that are listed there and look for the URL of the 404 page inside the source of the page.

If you find the URL inside the source of the page, then the page will be crawled. You need to redirect address of the missing page to the new URL of it.

If you can't find the URL inside the source of the page, then it might be a temporary problem inside your website. In this case, simply mark the error as fixed.

If the errors that you mark as fix appear again, you need to check the new list of "linked from" pages and it means that there's still a link pointing to the page. You can check the "date detected" and compare it with the date that you mark the error as fixed.

Please note that you need to be patient for this process since Google search console data belongs to a few days ago.

So for up to a week, mark all the errors as fixed and then wait for Google bot to show you the real missing pages.

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  • The /0 entries keep on appearing. – ThisRestlessPilgrim Jun 14 '18 at 17:12
  • As I described above, you should check "Linked from" tab and see if there's any inbound links (Links from other domains to /0 pages). – Shayan Davoodi Jun 24 '18 at 11:32
  • I have already said that it claims they are coming from internal pages and such links do not exist. – ThisRestlessPilgrim Jun 25 '18 at 16:29
  • So simply keep marking them as fixed for one week and then see if they appear again or not. – Shayan Davoodi Jun 27 '18 at 5:07
  • They reappear when deleted. – ThisRestlessPilgrim Jun 28 '18 at 17:44

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