Weird 404 erros

[astahl11]

Hi guys, new here.  Did a little search here and didn't see anything exactly like it.  My bad if it's been discussed.

I've read most of the FAQ's and haven't seen this exact problem addressed.My site is **http://tinyurl.com/89aury5**I recently installed a new design and since then have been having lots of 404 errors.You can see the screenshot here http://awesomescreenshot.com/0b92z1615There has been a perfect correlation between loss in traffic and the rise in errors as well.  **Most of the errors I have are /function.opendir after what would be a normal URL.  **Most of these appear on the 2nd and 3rd page of the crawl report which you can't see on the screenshot.Anyway, I don't have any broken links on the site(that I can find), and certainly not any of these that google is crawling.  I've read it might be a PHP error but no one seems to be able to find it.  Pretty bizarre.Looking for any help.   Thanks!

[icecarats]

The error basically means that your PHP page called a function (opendir) and it errored out. This is built into php in case you wanted to specifically trap for that event  (e.g. to write your own custom error page in this instance). This blog post does a pretty good job of summing it up:

http://perishablepress.com/eliminate-404-errors-for-php-functions/

[astahl11]

Awesome, thanks!   So for someone who doesn't code PHP should I just point a developer to that article and see if they can figure out how to fix it?

I don't have a clue where to look to fix those errors unfortunately.  Willing to learn but outside of the current skill set.

Also, do you think these errors would affect SEO?  I guess I'll find out when I fix them, just curious what your opinion is.  Thanks!

[icecarats]

If you follow their advice it's actually pretty easy; what they suggest in the article is just disabling the 'custom' error functionality for those php functions so it doesn't present 404 any more. This means copying and pasting those 5-6 lines into one file inside your root web directory. They end the article with another code snipped that will actually log those errors into a log file on your system instead of letting them go 'invisibly' (because once you disable the custom error how do you know if it's happening any more?).

SEO wise it's hard to say. Obviously in an absolute sense less errors = more better, but the 404s should be considered in context of your overall site's performance. What you might want to examine is why did your error rate apparently triple around February?

[astahl11]

Awesome, thanks.  I implemented several new plugins and a new design, and then immediately the errors started happening.

I'll see if my developer who made all the changes can do some research to figure it out.  Thanks again for the help!

[icecarats]

One last thing to note is that by doing this you're not 'fixing' the errors; you're preventing the search engines from seeing them. In the case posited in the blog the errors were actually caused by the search engines going after wacky URLs but there may be other problems with your site that were causing those errors. So I guess I'm saying don't stop looking into it after the pages stop getting indexed just in case.