Author Topic: strange 404 errors (Read 4557 times)

cascoly · « **on:** July 30, 2013, 18:43 »

been getting a number of errors like http://cascoly-images.com/pix/search-images/beans/page/2/ thru webmaster tools

anyone know how this url is created? the linked from area is blank. what's odd, is this url actually goes to a page that says "no results' and the keyword it says has no results works fine if you resubmit

is it possible that google doesn't recognize the 'no results' page?

it's probably innocuous, but just curious

THP Creative · « **Reply #1 on:** July 30, 2013, 19:47 »

I have the exact same thing, and have reported it to Leo in the past.

They just keep on getting created. It seems it might be a pagination error coming from somewhere, as it is always "/page/XXX" to a page which doesn't exist.

This was occurring early in the beta process from where the network search results displayed 6 or so results from each person and then said "...Next 100 pages", but when you followed that through of course the page didn't display 6 results on the persons site, it displayed the normal 25 or whatever it is, which made a huge difference to how many pages of results there were. I mentioned it to Leo and he thought he got it fixed (the number of errors certainly went down), but perhaps this is still in relation to it somehow?

cascoly · « **Reply #2 on:** July 30, 2013, 20:00 »

just can't tell -- what's odd is the page functions now, so i'm not too worried, mostly curious how google gets these urls in the first place!

meanwhile, I havent had missing datasheet error in a week or so, so google's finally given up generating those

Leo Blanchette · « **Reply #3 on:** July 30, 2013, 20:01 »

They are not damaging. Its a side-effect of your buddies linking to content you might not have.

For instance, I can create a 404 for you right now

thpstockphotos.com/something-that-does-not-exists/

Google will index this and let you know its a dead-end.

I'm going to refine the tagging system a bit, its just been a lesser priority for me.

THP Creative · « **Reply #4 on:** July 30, 2013, 20:37 »

Yeah I get that Leo, but what I don't understand is why is someone linking to me on a page that doesn't exist? Eg: Why would I link to Cascoly at this link http://cascoly-images.com/pix/search-images/beans/page/2/ when it doesn't exist? I'm sure people aren't doing this manually, so somewhere in the theme it must be making these links from our network partners, then google finds them and discovers they're dead ends.

Does that make sense?

Leo Blanchette · « **Reply #5 on:** July 30, 2013, 20:51 »

Quote from: Microstock Man on July 30, 2013, 20:37

Yeah I get that Leo, but what I don't understand is why is someone linking to me on a page that doesn't exist? Eg: Why would I link to Cascoly at this link http://cascoly-images.com/pix/search-images/beans/page/2/ when it doesn't exist? I'm sure people aren't doing this manually, so somewhere in the theme it must be making these links from our network partners, then google finds them and discovers they're dead ends.

Does that make sense?

Yep! Complete sense.

This is whats happening:

The SEO strategy is largely carried out through the TAG system. The human search engine you use is completely different.

Example:

http://www.clipartillustration.com/?s=cute&post_type=image < made for humans

http://www.clipartillustration.com/search-images/cute-2/ < mostly for crawlers

In *some* cases the crawler oriented results are pointing to dead ends.

stockphoto-images.com · « **Reply #6 on:** July 30, 2013, 21:32 »

I posted about this phenomenon a little while ago and I thought the (in the meantime over 200) 404s I receive are a problem.

The way I understand how it works is that one of my network partner's site is performing a search, crawling my portfolio and not finding anything thus creating a 404.

I could be wrong though, I'm not a web pro...

Anyhow, I believe these 404 links that I see in my SEO back-end are not actually being indexed by Google. They are just references of searches that didn't yield any results - at least most of them in my case.

Maybe someone can elaborate if this is somewhat accurate.

Leo Blanchette · « **Reply #7 on:** July 30, 2013, 21:37 »

Yep, you got it.

I think I just need to set up a redirect.

Actually a 404 does not even have to be thrown in the first place. I could just make a dynamic landing page that changes its title based on a number of things (avoiding duplicate content)

This issue was quite difficult to address in the first month of creating the theme....wordpress sometimes takes away your freedom to address things like this.

Anyway, its on the to-do