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    Page loads fine for users but returns a 404 for Google & Moz

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
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    • leapSEO
      leapSEO last edited by

      I have an e-commerce website that is built using Wordpress and the WP E-commerce plug-in, the products have always worked fine and the pages when you view them in a browser work fine and people can purchase the products with no problems.

      However in the Google merchant feed and in the Moz crawl diagnostics certain product pages are returning a 404 error message and I can't work out why, especially as the pages load fine in the browser.

      I had a look at the page headers and can see when the page does load the initial request does return a 404 error message, then every other request goes through and loads fine. Can anyone help me as to why this is happening?

      A link to the product I have been using to test is: http://earthkindoriginals.co.uk/organic-clothing/lounge-wear/organic-tunic-top/

      Here is a part of the header dump that I did:

      http://earthkindoriginals.co.uk/organic-clothing/lounge-wear/organic-tunic-top/
       
      GET /organic-clothing/lounge-wear/organic-tunic-top/ HTTP/1.1
      Host: earthkindoriginals.co.uk
      User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:21.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/21.0
      Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,/;q=0.8
      Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5
      Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
      Cookie: __utma=159840937.1804930013.1369831087.1373619597.1373622660.4; __utmz=159840937.1369831087.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none); wp-settings-1=imgsize%3Dmedium%26hidetb%3D1%26editor%3Dhtml%26urlbutton%3Dnone%26mfold%3Do%26align%3Dcenter%26ed_size%3D160%26libraryContent%3Dbrowse; wp-settings-time-1=1370438004; __utmb=159840937.3.10.1373622660; PHPSESSID=e6f3b379d54c1471a8c662bf52c24543; __utmc=159840937
      Connection: keep-alive
       
      HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
      Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 09:58:33 GMT
      Server: Apache
      X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.17
      X-Pingback: http://earthkindoriginals.co.uk/xmlrpc.php
      Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT
      Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0
      Pragma: no-cache
      Vary: Accept-Encoding
      Content-Encoding: gzip
      Content-Length: 6653
      Connection: close
      Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • cahams
        cahams last edited by

        Hello,

        The status returned is 404 not found, this is independent of whether the page is loaded or not.

        There is something that is generating that code either htaccess, some php code, maybe some redirection, a misconfigured rewrite, look for what can be, with that code, pages are not indexed.

        Sorry for my english.

        Best regards,
        Carlos

        leapSEO 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • leapSEO
          leapSEO @cahams last edited by

          Thanks for the help guys, it is good to actually have a direction to look in now, I was just completely stuck before. I will post any updates I have.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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