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Trying to clean up my site's 404's.

Link shown in webmaster tools seems problematic.

         

Broadway

5:05 pm on Sep 29, 2010 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Webmaster tools shows this link in my Crawl Errors and says it triggers my 404 error page:

http://www.example.com/t7_page.htm

There is no error in the above URL, that is the proper URL. But when I click the link in Webmaster Tools I do get my 404 page.

When, with my mouse, I right click the link in Webmaster tools and "copy link location" and then paste it into a text editor, I see the above link is really:

http://www.example.com/t7_?page.htm

I've tried all of the following redirects as a solution, but neither works when I click the webmaster tools link (I still get the 404 page). What is the solution?

redirect 301 /t7_?page.htm http://www.example.com/t7_page.htm

redirect 301 /t7_ http://www.example.com/t7_page.htm

redirect 301 /t7_? http://www.example.com/t7_page.htm

redirect 301 /t7_page.htm http://www.example.com/t7_page.htm

Other links (not the one shown in webmaster tools) in the format http://www.example.com/t7_page.htm (the correct format) work just fine with or without the above redirect attempts.

AnkitMaheshwari

4:50 am on Sep 30, 2010 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



This must be a bug and should resolve automatically. It happens all the time with WMT

phranque

1:11 pm on Sep 30, 2010 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



GWT should tell you who is linking to that url.
if the url is correct on the linking page i would ignore the GWT report.

Broadway

3:15 am on Oct 1, 2010 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



You know, GWT doesn't list the source of the link they followed (nor for any of the other 5 crawl errors it lists), although before, with other errors, it did.

At first I thought that that meant that they were errors on my own site's pages (internal links). But this site is static, hand coded HTML and the crawl errors just didn't look like the type of errors I could make (nor could I find these errors on my pages).

phranque

2:22 pm on Oct 1, 2010 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



check your server access logs to see who is requesting those urls and what referers are provided if any.

Future

8:12 pm on Oct 2, 2010 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



phranque, this is a pesky task loading a huge log file in your notepad :(
i will take ages finding the bad domain or someone who accidentally mite have linked wrong links for us.

phranque

12:02 am on Oct 3, 2010 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



grep 404 /var/log/httpd/access_log >404.txt

tangor

7:24 am on Oct 3, 2010 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Even easier is change the URL/URI to something different and get on with biz. Sometimes if it is broke, you fix it.