4XX client error with email address in URL

[EliteVenu]

I have an unusual situation I have never seen before and I did not set up the server for this client.  The 4XX error is a string of about 74 URLs similar to this:

http://www.websitename.com/about-us/info@websitename.com

I will be contacting the server host as well to troubleshoot this issue.  Any ideas?

Thanks

[RyanPurkey]

If that's what you're seeing it looks like someone used a relative href link instead of a mailto link for emails on the about us page.

[tawnycase]

Hi there! Tawny from the Help Team here - I think I can help provide a little bit of insight!

If you take a look at the Site Crawl report for this site's campaign and look at just the 4XX client errors, you'll see a Linking Page column in the table below the graph. That's the page from which our crawler arrived at the 404 page, and is where you can start looking for what went wrong.

I'd recommend taking a peek at that Linking Page's source code and searching for the email address - that's likely where you'll find the issue.

I hope this helps! Feel free to write in to us at help@moz.com if you still have questions and we'll do our best to help you out!

[EliteVenu]

That gave me the right direction to look in!  A social icon plugin did not require the mailto in the dashboard settings, (as it only said "enter your email address here") and the theme wrote it as href in the theme's code.  I looked at the source code, but overlooked this small detail.  I removed the social icon email so I will see if it helps.

Thanks for the response!

[RyanPurkey]

Great!  Glad I could help.

[MattRoney]

Hi EliteVenu! I'm so glad Ryan pointed you in the right direction. If that turns out to fix the problem, mind marking one or both of his responses as a "Good Answer?"