wrong url in serps

why?

[chasing something]

i noticed some 404s in my stats and cheked it out. turns out google has the wrong urls listed for my pages...it's mostly correct but missing the folder.

example..

the real url is
www.widget.com/widget/widget.html

but the listed url is
www.widget.com/widget.html (which doesn't exist)

this is not just for one page either.

i've sent them a note about it, but i'm wondering if anyone can tell me why this has happened and what else i can do about it.

[texasville]

If "www.widget.com/widget.html" has never existed- then this is a new weird problem for me. Never heard of it- give you a bump back to the top.

[colin_h]

This probably isn't the same problem, but I've been noticing a lot of added spaces in url listings on google. For instance www.widgets.com/ widgets/widgets.html

The links still seem to work though.

[encyclo]

You should 301 redirect the non-existent URL to the correct one. If the page has never existed, it could be a broken inbound link. Does your server issue the correct 404 header for non-existent pages?

For the spaces in listed URLs it is merely for formatting purposes - avoiding sideways scroll on small screens.

[chasing something]

i'm not sure what you mean about the 404 headers? i have a custom 404 page with my sitemap now though.

i can do the 301...good thinking, thanks, but i wonder how many other pages i need to do that for?

the pages have never existed, so i haven't a clue why google listed them that way. how can the spider not know where it is?

[jatar_k]

>> i have a custom 404 page with my sitemap now though

does this still return a proper 404 or is it serving a 200 when they get this page? If it gives a 200 then any non existent url will act as if it exists, which would make a search engine think it's real, and this could be the root of your problem.

[chasing something]

it shows a 404 in my stats, so i guess that means it works properly (thats how i noticed the problem)
how do i chek otherwise?

[jatar_k]

you could try something like this
[searchengineworld.com...]

[chasing something]

thanks...it works properly

[jatar_k]

good thing ;)

the 301 should do the trick then

[g1smd]

I have found several sites that for pages that do not exist, they issue a 302 redirect to the error page. These sites are suffering badly in Google's index.

An error page should be served with the status "404".

The stsus for non-existent URLs could be changed to serve either 404 Not Found or 410 Gone, or else the URL redirected to the correct page using a 301 redirect.

Run Xenu LinkSleuth over your site to make sure that there isn't a broken or malformed link somewhere within your own site.