Mystery 404's

[KempRugeLawGroup]

I have a large number of 404's that all have a similar structure: www.kempruge.com/example/kemprugelaw. kemprugelaw keeps getting stuck on the end of url's. While I created www.kempruge.com/example/ I never created the www.kempruge.com/example/kemprugelaw page or edited permalinks to have kemprugelaw at the end of the url. Any idea how this happens? And what I can do to make it stop?

Thanks,

Ruben

[Schwaab]

Are you seeing these 404s in Webmaster Tools or when crawling the site?

If WMT where does it say the 404 is linked to from? Click on the URL with the 404 error in WMT and select the "Linked from" tab.

Crawl the site with Screaming Frog and your user agent set to Googlebot.  See if the same 404 errors are being picked up and if so, you can click on them and select the "In Links" tab to see what page the 404 is being picked up on.

I checked the source code of some of the pages on www.kempruge.com and didn't see any relative links which usually create problems like this.  My bet is on a site scraping your site and creating 404 errors when they link back to your site.

[Schwaab]

I crawled your site and didn't see the 404 errors.

I did notice that your sitemap in your robots.txt 404's so you may want to take a look at that.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

It says it in Webmaster Tools, does that matter? I'm going to check on where from now. Also, I know my sitemap 404's, but I can't figure out what happened. If you go here: http://www.kempruge.com/category/news/feed/ that's my sitemap. How it got changed to that, I have no idea. Plus, I can't find that page in the backend of WP to change the url back to the old one.

I tried redirecting the proper sitemap name to the one that works, but that didn't seem to work.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

In GWT, the 404s are slightly different. They are www.kempruge.com/example/www.kempruge.com

In BWT, it's the www.kempruge.com/example/kemprugelaw

In GWT, they say the 404's are coming from my site, but I couldn't find out where it says that for BWT.

Any thoughts, and thanks for helping out. This has been bothering me for awhile.

Ruben

[crackingmedia]

Hi Ruben

You mentioned: In GWT, the 404s are slightly different. They are www.kempruge.com/example/www.kempruge.com

I have seen this type of thing before, or something similar, when an absolute link has been entered into some anchor text or by itself without adding http:// before the link.

So the link has been entered as www.mydomain.com - which causes the error - but it should be entered as http://www.mydomain.com

Your issue may be something completely different, but I thought I would post this as a possible solution.

Peter

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Peter,

You're a genius! I'm almost certain that's it, because I can't remember adding "http://" Is there a way to get rid of those pages? I just 301 redirected them to where they are supposed to go, but I have a lot of redirects. When I say a lot, I mean a lot relative to how many pages I have. We have 500 something indexed pages, and probably 200 something redirects. I know that many redirects slows our site down. I'd like to know if there's any better option that the 301s, if I can't just delete them.

Thanks,

Ruben

[crackingmedia]

Hi Ruben

I'm glad that has helped you

There is one way you could do multiple updates BUT I would not recommend it as doing it wrong could screw up your site. You could do it via the control panel in your site's hosting by querying your MySQL database via PHPMyAdmin and doing a bulk search and update for all references to www.kempruge.com where it doesn't have http:// in front and replacing www.kemruge.com with http://www.kempruge.com.

Although it is a pain I know, the best way is to fix the errors one by one in the pages themselves and leave the redirects running until you are sure that Google, Bing and Yahoo have updated their indexes, then you can remove them.

If you copy http:// onto your Mac/PC clipboard, then it will make it quicker to open the link dialog and paste at the start of the URL.

Peter

[KempRugeLawGroup]

One by one is fine with me. I'd much prefer that to screwing up the site.

Thanks again,

Ruben