I want proper 404s!

  • HF T

    (@hftraders)


    14 years ago

    Hi,

    I’ve got a problem on my site which I can’t figure out….

    I’ve just changed the structure of the jobs on my site away from just having posts, to a complete job board solution within pages. The problem with this is that it’s left me with hundreds of indexed job posts which don’t exist. I didn’t really mind this as they’ll drop off Google when it gets 404s when it crawls them. Or not…

    Some plugin on my site is causing it to give a ‘soft 404’ within my site. If you go to www(Dot)highfrequencytraders(dot)com/(anything random) you’ll see what I mean.

    Now I’m guessing that Google doesn’t consider this to be 404 as it’s not receiving that from the server. Which means that I’ve got lots of indexed pages which aren’t going away!

    I’ve tried deactivating any plugin which I think could be causing this and it hasn’t made a difference. These are the SEO/meta related plugins which I’m running (and deactivated);

    GHPSEO
    Admin Trim Interface
    All in one webmaster
    Domain Change (to divert my non www. url)
    XML Sitemaps
    Robots Meta
    Permalink Finder
    Simple 301 Redirects
    Theme My Login
    WP Hide Dashboard
    WP No Category Base

    Does anyone know what I can do to try to sort this out? Or will Google consider pages to be 404s and drop them from the index?

    Thanks

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
  • esmi

    (@esmi)

    Have you tried:

    – deactivating all plugins to see if this resolves the problem? If this works, re-activate the plugins one by one until you find the problematic plugin(s).

    – switching to the Twenty Ten theme to rule out any theme-specific problems?

    Thread Starter HF T

    (@hftraders)

    Hi esmi,

    Thanks for the advice.

    I’ve tried both of those things.

    De-activated every plugin and it still does it.

    Switched to Twenty Ten and it still does it.

    I’m stumped. I’ve got a developer doing some work for me this week so I’ll see if he can work it out.

    Any ideas in the mean time from anyone would be great!

    esmi

    (@esmi)

    If you go to www(Dot)highfrequencytraders(dot)com/(anything random) you’ll see what I mean.

    But that’s a genuine 404! There’s not a lot you can do about that.

    Thread Starter HF T

    (@hftraders)

    But that’s not a server 404. Which as far as Google is concerned, isn’t a 404, it’s just a blank page with ‘404 Error’ as the H1 Title’ which it will probably index as it’s content.

    Up until a few weeks ago, I always got server 404 which looked like this… https://www.velvetblues.com/wp-content/uploads/godaddy-404-error.gif

    esmi

    (@esmi)

    But that’s not a server 404.

    It can be – if you have a custom 404 template.

    Thread Starter HF T

    (@hftraders)

    Ah sorry.

    So what you’re saying is that that is displaying a custom site 404 which is classed in the http header as a server 404?

    esmi

    (@esmi)

    Yes! ??

    Thread Starter HF T

    (@hftraders)

    Ok thanks, I’ll see how I get on with the pages being dropped from the SEs.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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