10
votes
Accepted
Could a brand name called "Error 404" cause SEO issues?
You will be able to get your most of your content indexed, but there will probably be some SEO issues associated with that brand name. Google uses heuristics to determine if the page is an error page. ...
- 98.3k
8
votes
Accepted
Ok to use meta noindex on 404 pages?
There's no problem having a meta noindex tag on the 404 page, to prevent 200 OK responses being indexed.
If this was a PHP page then you could obviously just send a 404 Not Found header as part of the ...
- 42.7k
6
votes
Accepted
Is it necessary to handle every 404 reported in Google Search Console?
Is it necessary to handle every 404 reported in Google Search Console?
No.
You only need to resolve 404 errors in Google Search Console (GSC) if it's not meant to be a 404. ie. If your site is ...
- 42.7k
6
votes
Accepted
Weird bot requests in logs
So I dealt with something similar a while back and it was a real pain. I was constantly getting requests for random pdfs and Mexican food recipes in my logs. The IPs were Googlebot, Bingbot, etc (...
- 6,221
5
votes
Accepted
Accidentally submitted broken URLs in a sitemap. How can I stop Google crawling them?
Googlebot generally never stops crawling pages once it starts. It is possible that Googlebot will return to check on those URLs every once in a while indefinitely. For reference here is an article ...
- 98.3k
5
votes
Google bot hits on files 'apple-app-site-association' and 'assetlinks.json' showing up in Google Webmasters as pages with errors
The file which is being requested is a json file used by some websites to map certain sections of the site and certain pages to a native app so that going into those sections or pages will ...
- 10.2k
5
votes
Is it bad for SEO to return a 404 for a page that is temporarily unavailable instead of a redirect to the home page?
A 302 to the home page is likely to be seen as a soft-404 anyway, so that's unlikely to be of any benefit.
A 404 can be perceived as temporary (a 410 is more permanent) and if the page doesn't exist ...
- 42.7k
5
votes
Accepted
Is Google responsible for th1s_1s_a_4o4.html?
Found this on a Site Lock Facebook page.
SiteLock - Website Security Thanks for the info. After looking into your account, you do have a free scanner provided by your hosting company. In order ...
- 66
5
votes
Accepted
Does Google return to visit a page with 404 Error?
Nice question. The short answer is yes. As long as the error 404 URL has internal/external links pointing to them, Google will eventually visit the page. We can check this through:
Google Search ...
- 3,807
4
votes
Google Webmaster Tools reporting crawl error 404 (Not found) for a page which has never existed
When a page is reported in WMT, it means that their bot actually tried to scan this page normally. When clicking on the error, you can see where the page is linked from. There may be invalid links to ...
- 269
4
votes
Accepted
Looking for explanation of Apache behavior on manipulating headers
how this workaround indeed works
PHP runs later in the request, so most of the time you can simply override any headers that Apache has already set in your PHP code. That's pretty much it.
(Aside: ...
- 42.7k
4
votes
Accepted
What to do with unwanted URLs that link to my website?
Unfortunately there's not much you can do. You can't prevent these other (hacked) sites from linking to you. Besides, once Google has found these (now erroneous) URLs, it is likely to continue ...
- 4,297
4
votes
Accepted
Should I redirect all strange URLs in Google Webmaster Tools?
If you never intended to have such urls in your site and they truly mean nothing for you, then it's better to keep serving them as a 404 - a page that is not found - not existing in the site.
Use ...
- 375
4
votes
Accepted
How does this link redirect?
The initial request for http://www.esdc.gc.ca/en/cpp/post_retirement/eligibility.page returns a page that contains the following...
<script>
window.location.replace("/cgi-bin/op-so/err/404-fra....
4
votes
404 page vs. 404 server answer
The TLDR; answer: Send out a 404 header, don't change the url.
The longer answer:
There are more options then you suggest, which I'm not going to list here (because it's not really needed).
The ...
- 6,836
4
votes
404 page vs. 404 server answer
the url remains the same, but the page has the status code 404,
This is certainly the preferred option, as Martijn suggests. For a "custom" error page on Apache (ignoring the CMS option for a moment),...
- 42.7k
4
votes
Should I return 404 from dynamic product page if product no longer exists?
I would think you would need to return a 410 status code (gone) because this tells the spiders/clients that it is no longer in existence and remove it from the search engine/client cache.
- 329
4
votes
Accepted
Should I index 404.html in my "sitemap.xml" file?
404 Pages exist to let the users/browsers know that the page does not exist. There is no reason or need to index a 404 page. As long as your 404 page passes the error code, it is fine.
- 988
4
votes
Accepted
Can I tell google to temporarily index certain pages? I don't know if I want it to be permanent
Google understands that links are created and broken all the time on the web, so don't feel like you're making some kind of "permanent" commitment to Google by asking them to index a URL. ...
- 15.8k
4
votes
Accepted
Recreating content for 404 backlinks
Could I create pages for those backlinks, for instance showing a
picture of grand canyon with a notice that this might not be the image
the visitor is looking for since the site now serves a different
...
- 1,253
4
votes
Accepted
What to do with unwanted URL parameters?
Use a canonical tag
The best option is usually to use a canonical tag to tell search engines that the preferred URL doesn't have those URL parameters.
This handles the duplicate content issues ...
- 98.3k
3
votes
"404. That’s an error." when viewing from Google cache
As I'm watching one of my sites closely, I noticed that the cache is now giving me a 404.
I just bought a new domain name and the Google cache of that domain home page would return the old home page ...
- 2,215
3
votes
How do I fix the crawl errors from Google Search Console where all my URLs end with htmlprint instead of html?
Somewhere your site is linking to the "htmlprint" version. The first thing to do is figure out where that broken link is and fix it. View the source of your page and search for "htmlprint".
...
- 98.3k
3
votes
Accepted
Google stores user input from site URL
The 404 errors are not from user input. Rather they are from links that Google has found while crawling the web. If you click on the 404 errors in the report you can see where Googlebot found the ...
- 98.3k
3
votes
How to tell Googlebot to crawl just URLs ending in .html
When Googlebot is crawling such a large number of bad URLs, it is almost always because your site is misconfigured and you are linking to the URLs incorrectly somewhere.
In your case it is the "show ...
- 98.3k
3
votes
Getting a 404 error after configuring a CNAME alias for a subdomain
It seems likely that you managed to configure the CNAME correctly. You can test it by using ping and ensuring that both host names report the same IP address.
$ ping developer-test.w.pw
PING ...
- 98.3k
3
votes
Accepted
Why is a map page reported as a "soft 404" in Google Search Console?
Soft 404s are caused when Google thinks you should have returned a 404/410 for a request, but instead returned 200. Google defines this as when ‘the content of the page is entirely unrelated to the ...
- 3,207
3
votes
Accepted
Google Webmaster finding url with redirects
There are two types of redirects :
1) 301 : permanent redirect -> If you have added this, then google will know that you have permanently moved this page and will store this in its index.
2) 302 : ...
- 1,714
3
votes
WordPress creating URLs which are not found
Given the default behavior of WordPress, what you describe almost has to be a misbehaving plugin or custom function in your functions.php file.
What I would do is the following:
Disable all plugins
...
- 5,582
3
votes
Google bot hits on files 'apple-app-site-association' and 'assetlinks.json' showing up in Google Webmasters as pages with errors
You are not being hacked. Google Bot is trying to see if you have those files using Digital Assets Links protocol to check whether your website has any association with an App.
You can read more ...
- 131
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible