What to do with 404 detection?

Hi, please read the following information added by the developers in regards to 404 errors found in the plugin when you activate the following feature 404 Detection Option.

A 404 or Not Found error occurs when somebody tries to access a non-existent page on your website.
Typically, most 404 errors happen quite innocently when people have mis-typed a URL or used an old link to page which doesn’t exist anymore.
However, in some cases you may find many repeated 404 errors which occur in a relatively short space of time and from the same IP address which are all attempting to access a variety of non-existent page URLs.
Such behaviour can mean that a hacker might be trying to find a particular page or URL for sinister reasons.

The above explanation helps you understand further what a 404 error means. In reality there is not much you can do to prevent a 404 error from happening in your site. All you can do is protect yourself against a possible hacker attack attempting some bad behavior in your site as mentioned above. Sometimes a 404 error can also mean that someone was searching for a URL from your site and ended up producing a 404 error page not found because of a broken link in your site. Or they typed the URL incorrectly. What you can also do to help reduce 404 error messages from happening in your site is by making sure there are no broken links in your sites including URLs.

Methods to prevent broken links:

There are a few good plugins in WordPress repository that helps you search for broken links in your site. This is something you should monitor from time to time. Remember as your site becomes large with many pages and/ or post, broken links will occur. If you also allow visitors to comment on your site, some might add legitimate links to sites, other information etc which from time to time they become broken for various reasons. I monitor my clients blogs and my blog regularly for broken links and most of the times I find broken links :)This is inevitable.

The above provides basic steps to find and resolve broken links (404 page not found error message).

If you need more information, please let me know.

Kind regards

Thank you for the information – helpful.

In our case “innocent” browsing is less than 1% of the 404’s – most of them are from “attacks.” I’ve taken the IP ranges and added them to the blacklist – I believe that is all we can really do.

However, I will add a plugin for the broken links and see what that turns up.

Thank you for reporting back. Please share any findings from the plugin you might use.

Regards