In Webmaster Tools: 404 (Not found)?

[MarkWolk]

One of my sites in Google Webmaster Tools -> Diagnostic -> Web crawl -> Not found has a 404 (Not found) error as follows:

http://www.example.com/example.html%E2%80%9C%20=EN

(example.com being my site)

What on earth does that mean? I thought it might be a space left inadvertently in

<a href="http://www.example.com/example.html ">

but it is not the case. Maybe another character / series of characters, but which ones?

It only affects one page of my site.

[coopster]

The url is encoded. Decoded you will find

url encoded: http://www.example.com/example.html%E2%80%9C%20=EN 
url decoded: http://www.example.com/example.html“ =EN

[MarkWolk]

Thanks for replying. It is still a mystery to me. There is no such url in my website, and I can't see how I would have mistyped that!

I guess if no one else has any other suggestion, I will contact Google support.

[nmjudy]

I've been seeing some weird 404s as well since February. At first, I thought it might be something I was doing. But as more and more of these show up (currently at 323), I think googlebot is just trying to follow links from other sites that link back to my site. The problem is how the OTHER sites are linking to me pages. It's apparent to me that these other sites are somehow auto-generating these URLs. Here are some of my 404 examples:

http://www.example.com/mypage1.html%3E%3Cimg%20src=

http://www.example.com/mydirectory/index.html%2520

http://www.example.com/mypage2.html%20Page Title Word 1%20-%20Page Title Word 2%20Page Title Word 3%20Page Title Word 4

http://www.example.com/mydirectory3/mysubdirectory/truncatedpagenamewithouthtmlextension

http://www.example.com/mydirectory2/mysubdirect.../mypage3.html

Note: The last example doesn't have my full subdirectory name - googlebot was actually looking for a subdirectory with "..." in the name - this would HAVE to be in a backward link. What's interesting is that this is how Yahoo and some directory sites sometimes show URLS in their search results/listings.

The 2nd to last example truncates my page name (I have numerous of these entries).

[edited by: encyclo at 8:02 pm (utc) on Mar. 28, 2007]
[edit reason] switched to example.com [/edit]

[g1smd]

It is amazing the number of URL typos that you will have pointing at various pages of your site. This seems even more true where forums are involved and all sorts of things get cut and pasted and turned into links.

I have found that sometimes I cannot find the offending page using a Google search but can find the page that the link is on by searching in Yahoo.

The "incoming links" section in Google Webmaster tools may help a little more in the future.

[pbaddock]

Is your site a joomla site? I've tripped over this with some fairly Joomla specific symptoms (CMS item id's incorrectly defined for home page menu links).

[Bewenched]

What i dont understand is why webmaster tools keeps reporting 404 errors on pages THAT DO EXIST! I'm getting tons of these. tested and tested until I'm blue in the face and NO problems what-so-ever. i'm so about to delete it all.

Why on earth would this be happening?

[pbaddock]

From my experience, I think ill defined re-write rules in .htaccess, or incorrectly configured Apache header settings (or CMS specific probs) are the main culprits. Having said that, I've found that switching between the file based verification and the meta verify approach usually yields one method of verifying, but of course if you are getting 404 headers from your home page, then this will cause bigger probs (googlebot not crawling, inability to generate automated xml sitemap). Hope that helps?

[g1smd]

The pages may have been 404 the last time that Googlebot looked at them.

Can you find out when that was?

What do your site logs say?