URL 404 errors after crawl? HELP!

[ChristineWeinbrecht]

I am getting Crawl errors. It shows multiple pages as. I know this is more of a technical question however, I cannot find the answer anywhere. I'm using wordpress

www.mydomain.com/title-of-page/mydomain.com/contact

WHAT IS THIS?!

[Anthony_NorthSEO]

Hi Christine,

This looks like some kind of misconfiguration in Wordpress that's probably being caused by your permalink structure. If you've installed any plugins lately that change your permalinks, try deactivating them and see if the problem remains.

Looks to me like the permalink structure or template is just repeating itself, so instead of going to yoursite.com/page it's going to yoursite.com/page/yoursite.com/page.

Should be an easy fix if you find the offending plugin or setting.

It could also be caused if you have manually linked to certain pages, and then changed your permalink structure, making the links that were correct before the change now point to pages that don't exist.

If you're site is working fine and you can't find the links pointing to the 404 pages, you can use Google Webmaster Tool's URL removal to stop them from being indexed, or add them to your robots.txt file via the Disallow command.

Hope this helps!

Anthony

[Anthony_NorthSEO]

Also, if you want to PM me your login details I'll be glad to take a look.

You can check my tested eLance scores at atlantamedia.elance.com.... just so you know I won't mess anything up

[technotech]

You simply forgot to put http:// before mydomain.com/contact

[ChristineWeinbrecht]

I am using a plugin SEO by Yoast, i checked the structure in place, seems ok to me.

when i visit the pages, the error doesn't come up. only when the pages are indexed in crawled do i get those errors.

So  I dont know where it is finding those links.

[ChristineWeinbrecht]

screen share?

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Christine

Just checking in here - are you still having trouble?

I would advise running the site through Screaming Frog and checking Webmaster Tools for the presence of the same crawl errors.

Screaming Frog should tell you if/where you currently have bad links on the site. Always good to double check with another tool.

Let us know, thanks!

[ChristineWeinbrecht]

Thanks Dan, I just ran that program (which was awesome) and yes i am still having errors. Im using a plug in by Yoast called Wordpress SEO plugin. Im still encountering the errors. Im thinking i need to disable the plugin all together.

So.... Not sure how to fix it.  Do i redirect the bad URLS somewhere? (even thought they dont even technically exist?)

Any help is appreciated. thanks

[evolvingSEO]

Christine

Can you tell us (or me via PM) the site? The Yoast plugin is bulletproof unless something else is messing with it. I won't reveal the site if you don't want me to, but will post an answer back here in the Q&A.

Thanks!

-Dan

[evolvingSEO]

Christine

Thanks for providing the site name to me via PM - won't reveal the site here, but I see the issue.

The contact link in your footer should always lead to the contact page;

• http://www.yourdomain.com/contact/

However, it is adding the subfolders of whatever directory you are in. If you are on the page

• http://www.yourdomain.com/your-subfolder/

it is linking to;

• http://www.yourdomain.com/your-subfolder/contact/

In which, of course, no contact page exists at that URL.

You need to find where the footer links are being created in your WordPress setup - options are;

• Could be in the theme settings
• Could be in a widget
• Could be "hardcoded" into the footer.php file (although I doubt it)

And see if you can enter the link to the contact page just as an absolute link (not a relative link) explanation on this page

In other words, you want the link in your footer to ALWAYS point at http://www.yourdomain.com/contact/

If this does not fix it, you may need to go into the "editor" and find the footer links in the footer.php file - where you can change the link to reflect the absolute path of the contact page.

If still at a loss, contact the help folks for your WordPress theme, cause this sounds like a theme issue if the mistake isn't on your end, this definitely has nothing to do with Yoast.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

[ChristineWeinbrecht]

Dan...

You may just be the man!  It ended up being a widget created specifically for the theme, that didn't have the absolute path to the contact page.   It was very simple to fix. Thank you

-Christine