404's - Page not found - Why?

What's causing this?

[zoobie]

My web stats say 9% of requests get 404's...What could possibly be causing this in such a small site?
Thanks

[BaseVinyl]

Probably just robots looking for a robots.txt file and not finding one so it makes a 404.

[defanjos]

Look at your stats and try to find out which files or file is causing the 404's - maybe you have a bad internal link or an outside link to a page that does not exist any longer.

[zoobie]

It's just a 2 page site...All links are good...How would I stop the errors with robots.txt?
Thanks

[defanjos]

How would I stop the errors with robots.txt?

Create one (robots.txt) and place it on the root of the site (the same folder as your index or default page)

Tutorial [searchengineworld.com]

[jdMorgan]

Files which are often assumed to be present on all sites:

/robots.txt Robots control file 
/favicon.ico Windows Favorites Icon 
/w3c/p3p.xml P3P Privacy policy

..and maybe more.

User agents may attempt to load any of those, and if you don't have them, you'll see 404 errors.

Jim

[amoore]

And then there is a bunch of worms and hackers that try to hit common scripts with security problems. For instance: formmail.cgi, cmd.exe, default.ida, and so on.

You ought to have a way to find out what filenames are brining up the 404's. It may not actually be a problem. Don't try to get rid of 404 errors just for the sake of it. They're not hurting anything.