No designated 404 page, but any made-up URL path displays homepage Good / Bad?
-
I have a custom website where if you type in companyxyz.com/_any-made-up-url _it displays the homepage.
So then you will see the homepage and in the URL bar the made up URL path remains visible "companyxyz.com/any-made-up-url"
Is this good or bad or not an issue?
-
URLs that don't exist should display an error page and return a 404 (not found) response.
When you have made-up URLs going to an actual page that returns a 200 (OK) response, the problem actually is that Google will start seeing this as soft 404 errors, which is not good.
From Google Search Console: "Returning a code other than 404 or 410 for a non-existent page (or redirecting users to another page, such as the homepage, instead of returning a 404) can be problematic. Firstly, it tells search engines that there’s a real page at that URL. As a result, that URL may be crawled and its content indexed. Because of the time Googlebot spends on non-existent pages, your unique URLs may not be discovered as quickly or visited as frequently and your site’s crawl coverage may be impacted..."
-
This is cause for duplicate content concerns unless you specifically have tagged this type of page as no-index or included a rel-canonical tag pointing to your homepage. You would not want a 404 page being indexed.
I think your best option is to create a functioning 404 error page without your homepage content or to designate the pages no-index with the following tag.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Information Architecture/URL Structure of a Consolidated Website
I am working on a project for a company that is going through a major transition. They are deciding to move from a subscription publisher to a digital membership content site. They are ALSO consolidating their sub-brands into one, becoming a branded house. They are a publisher of a niche-hobby, whose base is extremely passionate about the overarching topic. Currently, each sub-brand has its own website with its own branded content. Their new "mega-site" will have all content combined on one domain. Their goal is to appeal to a new user who has overlapping interests in one core topic, while also allowing their existing users and brand loyalists to be able to navigate the site by brand if they want to . If users land on the main domain HP, they will see a simple global navigation where they can navigate the content by topic OR select a brand. Each sub-brand will have it's own sub-navigation. We are currently at the phase where we are working on information architecture and trying to figure out the global nav and the nav for each individual brand. I am A) looking for advice on the best analytics reports to use to help inform navigation decisions and how to categorize content, and B) trying to decide if I should keep the BRANDED content in a sub-folder, or if I should categorize the content by topic and then tag branded content. I'm not concerned about how users will be able to filter the content because that will be easier to figure out. I'm just trying to decide what the main URLs should be when content can be navigated to in multiple ways. Would it be easier to redirect brand1.domain.com > domain.com/brand-1....? Are there benefits to doing it that way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | triveraseo0 -
Forwarded vanity domains, suddenly resolving to 404 with appended URL's ending in random 5 characters
We have several vanity domains that forward to various pages on our primary domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SS.Digital
e.g. www.vanity.com (301)--> www.mydomain.com/sub-page (200) These forwards have been in place for months or even years and have worked fine. As of yesterday, we have seen the following problem. We have made no changes in the forwarding settings. Now, inconsistently, they sometimes resolve and sometimes they do not. When we load the vanity URL with Chrome Dev Tools (Network Pane) open, it shows the following redirect chains, where xxxxx represents a random 5 character string of lower and upper case letters. (e.g. VGuTD) EXAMPLE:
www.vanity.com (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.mydomain.com/sub-page/xxxxx (404, Not Found) This is just one example, the amount of redirects, vary wildly. Sometimes there is only 1 redirect, sometimes there are as many as 5. Sometimes the request will ultimately resolve on the correct mydomain.com/sub-page, but usually it does not (as in the example above). We have cross-checked across every browser, device, private/non-private, cookies cleared, on and off of our network etc... This leads us to believe that it is not at the device or host level. Our Registrar is Godaddy. They have not encountered this issue before, and have no idea what this 5 character string is from. I tend to believe them because per our analytics, we have determined that this problem only started yesterday. Our primary question is, has anybody else encountered this problem either in the last couple days, or at any time in the past? We have come up with a solution that works to alleviate the problem, but to implement it across hundreds of vanity domains will take us an inordinate amount of time. Really hoping to fix the cause of the problem instead of just treating the symptom.0 -
We 410'ed URLs to decrease URLs submitted and increase crawl rate, but dynamically generated sub URLs from pagination are showing as 404s. Should we 410 these sub URLs?
Hi everyone! We recently 410'ed some URLs to decrease the URLs submitted and hopefully increase our crawl rate. We had some dynamically generated sub-URLs for pagination that are shown as 404s in google. These sub-URLs were canonical to the main URLs and not included in our sitemap. Ex: We assumed that if we 410'ed example.com/url, then the dynamically generated example.com/url/page1 would also 410, but instead it 404’ed. Does it make sense to go through and 410 these dynamically generated sub-URLs or is it not worth it? Thanks in advice for your help! Jeff
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeffchen0 -
Using Canonical URL to poin to an external page
I was wondering if I can use a canonical URL that points to a page residing on external site? So a page like:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | llamb
www.site1.com/whatever.html will have a canonical link in its header to www.site2.com/whatever.html. Thanks.0 -
301 redirect w/ dynamic pages to static
I am trying to redirect old dynamically created pages to a new static one (single page). However, when I implement the redirects, it still uses part of the old dynamic url. For instance... dynamic.php?var=example1 dynamic.php?var=example2 dynamic.php?var=example3 should all redirect to: static.html. However, they are redirecting to: static.html?var=example1 static.html?var=example2 static.html?var=example3 The page is resolving fine, but I don't want google to misinterpret the new static page as numerous page with dup content. I tried this in PHP on the dynamic.php page as follows, but it the problem above persisted: header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude
header('Location: http://www.mysite.com/static.html'); I tried doing it in my .htaccess file as follows, but the problem persisted: redirect 301 /info/tool_stimulus.php?var=example1 http://www.mysite.com/static.html
redirect 301 /dynamic.php?var=example2 http://www.mysite.com/static.html Can anyone solve this in PHP or w/ htaccess? Help!!! 🙂0 -
Page HTML great for humans, but seems to be very bad for bots?
We recently switched platforms and use Joomla for our website. Our product page underwent a huge transformation and it seems to be user friendly for a human, but when you look at one of our product pages in SEOBrowser it seems that we are doing a horrible job optimizing the page and our html almost makes us look spammy. Here is an example or a product page on our site: http://urbanitystudios.com/custom-invitations-and-announcements/shop-by-event/cocktail/beer-mug And, if you take a look in something like SEObrowser, it makes us look not so good. For example, all of our footer and header links show up. Our color picker is a bunch of pngs (over 60 to be exact), our tabs are the same (except for product description and reviews) on every single product page... In thinking about the bots: 1-How do we handle all of the links from footer, header and the same content in the tabs 2-How do we signal to them that all that is important on the page is the description of the product? 3-We installed schema for price and product image, etc but can we take it further? 4-How do we handle the "attribute" section (i.e. our color picker, our text input, etc). Any clarification I need to provide, please let me know.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | UrbanityStudios0 -
Duplicate Content http://www.website.com and http://website.com
I'm getting duplicate content warnings for my site because the same pages are getting crawled twice? Once with http://www.website.com and once with http://website.com. I'm assuming this is a .htaccess problem so I'll post what mine looks like. I think installing WordPress in the root domain changed some of the settings I had before. My main site is primarily in HTML with a blog at http://www.website.com/blog/post-name BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thirdseo
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress0 -
How do I set up a 301 redirect if the default settings for our web servers create multiple URLs for the same page?
How do I set up a 301 redirect if the default settings for our web servers create multiple URLs for the same page but only views it as one page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ibex0