404 Errors generating in WP
-
Our crawl reports are generating back several 404 errors for pages with urls that look like:
/category/consulting/page/5/
The tag changes, the page number changes, but the result is always the same: A big glaring 404. Our sites are built on WordPress Multi-site, and I am fairly certain this issue is on the WP end, but I can't figure out why it is generating pages out to infinity, essentially, from the tags and categories.
It is worse on some sites than others, but is happening across the board (my initial concern was that it might be a theme issue, but that does not seem to be the case).
If anyone has run into this issue and knows a fix, you're insight would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
-
This is the exact answer that you want if you have any issues running into problems once you have isolated them with screaming frog you can easily pick them out and redirect them either through your host or through a plug-in depending upon where you're hosted and how your site is being managed.
-
Here's what to do;
- Crawl the site with Screaming Frog (you can do up to 500 URLs with the free version).
- Look for the suspect pages in your crawl list.
- Click once on the page in the list
- Below, click "To Links" - and this box will show you the page(s) linking to the bad 404 page.
- View the "From" page (which links to the bad page) in your browser.
- Look at the source code for that page - do a "find" and paste in the bad page's URL. This will show you where it's linking from.
- Fix the spot in your theme or template where it is linking to pages that do not exist.
-
I want to first say I apologize for the wording on my first answer I was using voice recognition and it made a few mistakes. I also want to say I agree with what Dan has said he really knows WordPress and I would take
his advice the fact that he's endorsed Lynn's answer makes me believe that it is the correct one and screaming frog spider is one of the best tools in the world for any type of website and can help you create 301's easily to get rid of your 404's on the paid version
here is a great Screaming frog spider guide By Seer
http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide
I hope this helps,
Thomas
-
Hi Melissa, you've received some great responses. Did any of them help you resolve your issue?
-
I second Lynn's answer. You need to find where the link is coming from to begin with. Could also use Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Webmaster Tools - they will all get you the same thing. Find out where the bad URLs are linked from, and then you can narrow down the source of bad code or whatever it may be.
-Dan
-
Yoast's SEO plug-in for WordPress
Will eliminate the /1/ /2/ /3/ page effect.
http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/
I hope this is of help. The running multisite through a non-subdomain set up on expecting correct?
-
Hi Melissa,
It is actually pretty common for wp based sites to spin out repeated 404 errors (or at least have the potential to do this). It could be a theme issue, a plugin issue or a setup issue or a combination of all 3 depending on the site.
First thing to do is figure out where the link is coming from. Download your moz error report in csv and filter by 404's. On the left you will have the 404 page and on the far right you will have the referring page. Go to the referring page and view the source and try to find that link. Keep an eye out for relative links from deep structure pages also (so you have page /category/page/5 and the link is a relative href="/" or href="/6" which can have the effect of spawning repeated 404s like /category/page/5/6 etc etc).
Once you have found the link, you should be able to identify the template part which is producing them and then act accordingly to either edit the template or adjust the settings/plugin so that they stop. If you can give us a real example of a 404 and its linking page we should be able to give you more specific info.
-
I seriously doubt the issue is with WP. perhaps a plugin might be conflicting with how the page is rendered. Make sure you have a database and file backup. You could FTP in and rename the plugins folder to _plugins ( this will disable all plugins ) and check if the issue persists. Rename the folder back to plugins once you finish testing it.
NOTE : with some plugins you will have to manually go in a enable and configure them after you do this.
-
Hi 404 are extremely common. I would build 404 page and I would also use this plug-in here but make sure that you understand that this is by far no way perfect. You must check the logs consistently and make sure their note for forest mistaken for instance I had used it once and it had four or my feed back my homepage
http://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/
However this is a very good plug-in that has been progressively getting better. It is recommended by some of the best people in WP I strongly recommend using it and I hope I've helped you if you need anymore help please let me know.
sincerely,
Thomas
Yes this will also work if you're using Nginx a much faster web server type that Apache or even lightspeed. However it is very hard to create 301 anyone use a Nginx web server environment. However this tool is able to do so and then most Managed WordPress hosts are the ones that are actually using Nginx with this Internet these days. Or managed WordPress hosts are able to then rewrite the correct 301 with this redirection plug-in is able to create 301 100% then most of the time people running Nginx host make the corrections after the redirection have to spend time.
The specialty of this redirection plug-in the is catching 404's and redirecting them to a page that it should be redirected to logically for instance if I was going to have /about/ 404 and then /about- us/ the plug-in easily figure that out that should be the correct redirect and then mixed the correction automatically you can also turn off this mode once you believe 404's are no longer an issue.
You can also use an Apache only mode which depending on your Web server might me your needs better depending on what type of Webster rerunning
I think this is an outstanding plug-in and definitely believe that it is a huge help if you have a any amount of 404s.
I hope I've been of help,
Thomas
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
-
404 error for unknown URL that Moz is finding in our blog
I'm receiving 404 errors on my site crawl for messinastaffing.com. They seem to be generating only from our blog posts which sit on Hubspot. I've searched high and low and can't identify why our site URL is being added at the end - I've tried every link in our blog and cannot repeat the error the crawl is finding. For instance: Referer is: http://blog.messinastaffing.com/take-charge-career-story-compelling-cover-letter/ 404 error is: http://blog.messinastaffing.com/take-charge-career-story-compelling-cover-letter/www.messinastaffing.com I agree that the 404 error URL doesn't exist but I can't identify where Moz is finding it. I have approximately 75 of these errors - one for every blog on our site. Beth Morley Vice President, Operations Messina Group Staffing Solutions
Moz Pro | | MessinaGroup
(847) 692-0613 www.messinastaffing.com0 -
Duplicate Content errors - not going away with canonical
I am getting Duplicate Content Errors reported by Moz on search result pages due to parameters. I went through the document on resolving Duplicate Content errors and implemented the canonical solution to resolve it. The canonical in the header has been in place for a few weeks now and Moz is still showing the pages as Duplicate Content despite the canonical reference. Is this a Moz bug? http://mathematica-mpr.com/news/?facet={81C018ED-CEB9-477D-AFCC-1E6989A1D6CF}
Moz Pro | | jpfleiderer0 -
Duplicate Page Title error for an eCommerce store !!
I currently launched my eCommerce startup hosted in Shopify and linked with MOZ. From my first Crawl Report I am getting 580 Duplicate Page Title i.e. all my Collection page have the same title. I have googled and have been checking the MOZ community but cannot find a fix to it. Some of the URL's are - http://www.onlypetstore.com/collections/all http://www.onlypetstore.com/collections/all?page=10 http://www.onlypetstore.com/collections/all?page=100 http://www.onlypetstore.com/collections/all?page=101 http://www.onlypetstore.com/collections/all?page=102 http://www.onlypetstore.com/collections/all?page=103 I am new to SEO and any suggestions will be a great help to me.
Moz Pro | | OnlyPetStore2 -
The crawl report shows a lot of 404 errors
They are inactive products, and I can't find any active links to these product pages. How can I tell where the crawler found the links?
Moz Pro | | shopwcs0 -
Increase of 404 error after change of encoding
Hello, We just have launch a new version of our website with a new utf-8 encoding. Thing is, we use comma as a separator and since the new website went live, I have a massive increase of 404 error of comma-encoded URL. Here is an example : http://web.bons-de-reduction.com/annuaire%2C321-sticker%2Csite%2Cpromotions%2C5941.html instead of : http://web.bons-de-reduction.com/annuaire,321-sticker,site,promotions,5941.html I check with Screaming Frog SEO and Xenu, I can't manage to find any encoded URL. Is anyone have a clue on how to fix that ? Thanks
Moz Pro | | RetailMeNotFr0 -
How do I fix a duplicate content error with a top level domain?
Hi, I'm getting a duplicate content error from the SEOmoz crawler due to an issue with trailing slashes. It's showing www.milengo.com and www.milengo.com/ as having duplicate page titles. However I'm pretty sure this has been fixed in the .htaccess file since if you type in the domain with a trailing slash it automatically redirects to the domain without a trailing slash, so this shouldn't be an issue. I'm stuck here. Any ideas? Thanks. Rob
Moz Pro | | milengo0 -
High level of 404 client errors
My clients website is an e-commerce based website, where customers can go on and buy products etc from the website. I placed the website onto seomoz and it cam eback with something like 18,000 errors, mostly 404 client errors, when I checked to see what the URL was from, it was a summary of an order to a client who just purchased something from the website, this was the case for alot of the errors. So i am wondering, will this harm the site's optimisation or any other part of it? and how can I get rid of these errors? Many Thanks Charlene
Moz Pro | | Louise990 -
Lots of site errors after last crawl....
Something interesting happened on the last update for my site on SEOmoz pro tools. For the last month or so the errors on my site were very low, then on the last update I had a huge spike in errors, warnings, and notices. I'm not sure if somehow I made a change to my site (without knowing it) and I caused all of these errors, or if it just took a few months to find all the errors on my site? My duplicate page content went from 0 to 45, my duplicate page titles went from 0 to 105, my 4xx (client error) went from 0 to 4, and my title missing or empty went from 0 to 3. On the warnings sections my missing meta description tag went form a hand full to 444. (most of these looking to be archive pages.) Down in the notices I have over 2000 that are blocked by meta robots, meta-robots nofollow, and Rel canonical. I didn't have any where near this many prior to the last update of my site. I just wanted to see what I need to do to clean this up, and figure out if I did something to cause all the errors. I'm assuming the red errors are the first things I need to clean up. Any help you guys can provide would be greatly appreciated. Also if you'd like me to post any additional information, please let me know and I'd be glad to.
Moz Pro | | NoahsDad0