404 Pages in Google Search Console

  • Resolved nevena92

    (@nevena92)


    1 year, 6 months ago

    I noticed that for a few months, a random .html URLs have been injected on my website. I don’t know why and how this all is happening. I updated all plugins and themes (Enfold), I use Wordfence on my website, but 404 pages still appear in crawling report.

    Besides that, I used to have Yoast installed, but I replaced it with RankMath.

    Could it be that hackers are trying to inject HTML pages, but Wordfence ignores/deletes it, so it appears as 404?

    Any help is more than welcome.

    • This topic was modified 1 year, 6 months ago by nevena92.
Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Support wfpeter

    (@wfpeter)

    Hi @nevena92, thanks for your message.

    If any URL that doesn’t exist is requested through bot or human activity on your site, including that of broken links, WordPress will default to returning a 404 which Google wouldn’t usually crawl.

    Sometimes plugins or themes can be set to redirect these requests to the homepage or other location. This is not preferred behavior from our point of view as this can often show Wordfence URLs in Google Search Console or other external tools, but other pages redirected in this way will also show as “legitimate” pages – which sounds like what’s happening in your case.

    If you no longer redirect 404s on your site or change the behavior going forward, Google crawlers will eventually realize that these URLs are 404s afterall, not useful to crawl, and they’ll drop out of Search Console over time.

    Thanks,
    Peter.

    Thread Starter nevena92

    (@nevena92)

    Hi Peter, thank you for the quick answer.

    I have too many such pages, currently, there are more than 950. The number has been increasing since March 2023, so my concern is how do I prevent the website from new 404s?
    I can either set 301 to the homepage or simply 410(gone) for existing ones, but if new 404 appear over and over, my problem is still here ??

    Thanks for your help!
    Nevena

    Plugin Support wfpeter

    (@wfpeter)

    Hi @nevena92,

    Does your site currently redirect 404s or does it show a 404 page with the correct response code? I would recommend not redirecting and removing this functionality from any themes or plugins. I think 301 redirects might confirm to Google that the page was valid and has been permanently redirected to the homepage – so would be more likely to stay permanently in Search Console rather than resolve the situation.

    Thanks again,
    Peter.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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