My 404 page is returning a 404

[Stuart26]

Hi there,

Moz has highlighted that my 404 page is returning a 404... Looking at webmaster tools within crawl errors, it's the same story.

The only big change on the website is that we recently moved to https for the entire site, so all pages have a 301 to the corresponding https page, including the old 404 http page. I don't know if that makes any difference?

Any help or advice on how I reasolve this will be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Stuart

[DirkC]

Without the actual url it's difficult to give a very precise answer. You could check if your 404 page exist (check the status of the 404 page in http & https using web-sniffer.net). You could check if it's the correct 404 that is shown  (just type yourdomain.com/jfjkldgjlkfdj or something like that & see where it brings you) - if not - probably there is something wrong with your config;

rgds,

Dirk

[CleverPhD]

If Moz crawl is showing that it is finding your 404 page and it is showing a 404 response, that is good as this is what your 404 page is supposes to show.   What you need to see (and you need to download the CSV version of the report in Moz for this) is what page(s) are pointing to the 404 page?  Figure out if you need to have the links removed or updated or you possibly need to redirect them.

Search console 404s are different as Google may be finding those pages from other websites linking to yours. If there are old pages that are supposed to 404 then that is ok.  Let them 404 and they will eventually go away in Search Console.  If the pages are not supposed to 404 then you setup a 301 redirect etc.

[Stuart26]

Many thanks for the info.

It seems the linking page is the http://domain.com/404 page which has a 301 to the new https://domain.com/404 page

An issue?

Stuart

[CleverPhD]

How is http://domain.com/404 being found?  You should not have any links to that page to start with.

P

[Stuart26]

Good question, do you know what I can do to find out?

Stuart

[CleverPhD]

You need to look at the CSV version of your Moz crawl.  It will show what pages link to it.