Frequently getting 404 errors in GWT

[GovindIRC]

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[Perfect007]

There may be several reasons behind 404 error page. I had just audit your website. You are getting these 404 error page because of wrong coding. Most probably I have given wrong path in sub-directories of the coding. e.g.

I have found this page which in directory /wedding_wordings/ . Its a general path problem by designer in coding they provide same path /Wordings.htm in subdirectories but it should be either absolute path or with /wedding_wordings/Wordings.htm

http://www.indianweddingcards.com/wedding_wordings/Wordings.htm.

But real path is http://www.indianweddingcards.com/Wordings.htm .

One more thing in your website there is a also problem of URL re-writing. It's making multiple pages for a single page.

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Atul,

Where does GWT show these links originating from (in GWT click through to a specific url and then choose the 'linked from' tab)? They look like auto generated spam type stuff to me. If they are being generated from other irrelevant sites, firstly I would think that the links might well be quite temporary and secondly I wouldn't worry too much about them since there is likely not much you can do about them. Other than the annoyance, they are not likely to affect your site much in my opinion.

[GovindIRC]

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[LynnPatchett]

Ah,

In that case I think perfect007 is probably on the right track. Your 404 page has some issues and most of the links on it are going to 404 pages also. That in combination with your meta robots text which is  could well be making any issue with spam links worse by spawning more. I think first thing to do is make sure your 404 page is not adding to the problem and see if that at least reduces the issue.

[GovindIRC]

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[LynnPatchett]

Hi Atul,

The links from the blog you mention look like automated spam links that could be being generated for a number of reasons. If you have no relationship with this blog and have no way of contacting the webmaster then there might not be a lot you can immediately do to get rid of these links. Since they are going to 404 pages on your site anyway, as I mentioned previously I would not worry about them too much.

What I would worry about is what perfect007 mentioned also which is the errors that are appearing on your 404 page. You have many missing images, most if not all of the page's links lead to other 404 pages and your meta robots line is telling the search engines to follow all of these bad links. Your 404 page in short has many coding errors and these errors seem to be making the problem of the spam links worse because for every incoming spam link you have, your 404 page is creating even more bad links for google to crawl.

My advice would be to clean up the errors on your 404 page first. That should reduce the number of 404 errors you see in GWT that are being created from your own page. Once that is done you will have a better idea of how many external spam links are being created over time and with that information you may assess your next moves. In the first instance you could change the meta robots line to:

Which would at least stop the search engines from indexing the page and following the broken links on it.

Hope that helps.