Google is showing 404 error. What should I do?

[Somanathan]

Dear Experts,

Though few of my website pages are accessible, Google is showing 404 error. What should I do? Even moz reports gives me the same.

Problems:
1. Few of my Pages are not yet catched in Google. (Earlier all of them were catched by Google)
2. Tried to fetch the those pages, but Google says, page not found.
3. Included them in sitemap, the result is the same.

Please advice:

Note: I have recently changed my hosting server.

[GPainter]

You can use Screaming frog to find the 404 pages, from there you can either 301 them into the correct pages or a very similar page to help prevent the issue. You should also create a soft 404 page this is a page that shows a message like "opps we can't find your page" and then directs users (and bots) to a similar page or a homepage so its not such a  dead end.

I'm a bit confused as what you mean by "what to do" You can either fix them by putting content on them or 301 them to the correct page.

Hope that helps.

[Somanathan]

Hello Pixel,

Thank you for the response. My question is, when the pages are working, why do you want me to go with either 301 or other options. I am very sure that the page are working. After changing the hosting service only I am into this problem.

For ex: I have a page named "A". And this page is working perfectly when I tried to access it. And the same file is found on the server as well. But the tools are saying the page not found. What could be the reason.

Thank you.

[GPainter]

Screaming frog crawls your site "live" Moz & Google don't so it should show you any current 404 errors. the 404 is showing because the page is not there, you would 301 a 404 page to change it from a 404 to a 200 code.

IN short a 301 is to make it so a user lands on the page and rather than find nothing they find something.

Are you sure Page "A" is working and are you sure its page A that's the problem not something odd like page "A.php" etc. ?

Run screaming frog and see if that helps with finding 404's

[Somanathan]

I am very sure that, the page "A" is working perfectly.

Sure, Let me try Screaming frog crawl and keep you posted on the result.

BTW, thank you so much for your time and response as well.

[MonicaOConnor]

If you are logged into your admin panel, the one for your website, you will see every page most of the time.

Have you no followed those pages? Did you change the URL? If you changed the URL without redirecting the old URL you will get a 404 error. Make sure that when you changed your hosting solution that the URL structure didn't change for some reason.

[evolvingSEO]

Hey There

Are you all set? One thing to consider is sometimes browsers see things differently then search crawlers or web crawlers. Try a header checker like http://urivalet.com/ _and make sure to test different user agents _- like Chrome, Googlebot etc. Check the response code for each user agent. Maybe your browser sees a 200 but Googlebot sees a 404.

[Somanathan]

Yes rectified the problem. Accidentally our developers had included a php code on the header and we didnt notice. Finally identified and removed them.

BTW, thanks for your suggestion.

[Somanathan]

Everything is perfect now. The pages I mentioned are indexed now. Thank you Monica.

[evolvingSEO]

You're welcome!