Help please, new site has 60,000 404 errors
- Thread starter Snow
- Start date
It's picked as "post-name"
webwhizz
BANNED
- Apr 3, 2011
- 725
- 659
well just try them all, to see if it works, i think postname is default, but your original might of been custom, hard to say without seeing it. but id guess it's something with permalinks.
umerjutt00
Elite Member
- Oct 28, 2011
- 4,373
- 2,493
As others said, the problem is with the permalinks.
youtalkmedia
Senior Member
- Dec 5, 2011
- 856
- 390
If it was a copy paste install of a CMS many people forget to copy the .htaccess file since it is hidden. You can usually fix this by selecting another type of slug, then changing back, or if you still have access to the old host, copying the file.
webwhizz
BANNED
- Apr 3, 2011
- 725
- 659
.htaccess file usually get error 500 for that, but OP is bit vague, could be anything really.
youtalkmedia
Senior Member
- Dec 5, 2011
- 856
- 390
Not always, the permalink structure is stored in the htaccess, so if it was not stored correctly it would just show that none of the pages exist.
http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-fix-wordpress-posts-returning-404-error/
might help.
Couch Monkey Media
Elite Member
- Nov 8, 2009
- 2,787
- 1,146
that is a ton of errors I would have to go crazy with that many.
krishnacode360
Supreme Member
- May 30, 2012
- 1,360
- 423
I feel its negative seo. This is the latest startegy to do it . One f my site got it. my competetor repeatedly browsing non existent pages on my site and they got indexed on google
MikeFenton
Newbie
- Sep 8, 2016
- 26
- 4
Google can penalize a site if it has such huge 404 errors.. although this is a terrific method for some people!
Hi Guys, thanks all for your thoughts, I found that it seems to be some kind of Japanese Spam campaign, i wanted to link it here, but seems i'm not allowed to. This is a really positive community with people genuinely helping each other, keep it up!
ScissorBlake
Newbie
- Oct 28, 2016
- 42
- 3
60k? Really? Who have built your website?
trafficexpert393
Junior Member
- Dec 5, 2013
- 143
- 8
Wow, that sounds like negative SEO to me.
Zwielicht
Elite Member
- Aug 31, 2013
- 21,128
- 40,601
I recently dealt with something similar on one of my sites. However, instead of it showing up as a bunch of non-existent permalinks, it was targeting my search form!
I recently wrote an article on it recently as it reminded me of referrer spam. You can read it here, but I'll tell you what was going on in my case and what I did to fix it in my post.
So some guy on another forum posted this as a possible reason for the spam.
The spammer who hit your site may have shared the same motive, though with a different method.
Anyway, to fix it (for any of you dealing with search form spam) add these two line to your robots.txt file
Code:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /?s=If your visitors don't use your search form often, you can try disabling it permanently or at least temporarily. There's a plugin you can use for that.
You may have a few other options such as changing your search parameters, but I have yet to test these. Regardless, here's the search parameter code below:
PHP:
// Add this code to your functions.php file in your active theme folder
// Allow WordPress to access “search” in the query string
function ds_whitelist_new_search_parameter( $allowed_query_vars ) {
$allowed_query_vars[] = ‘search’;
return $allowed_query_vars;
}
add_filter(‘query_vars’, ‘ds_whitelist_new_search_parameter’ );
// populate s parameter with value of search
function ds_swap_search_parameter($query_string) {
$query_string_array = array();
// convert the query string to an array
parse_str($query_string, $query_string_array);
// if “search” is in the query string
if(isset($query_string_array[‘search’])){
$query_string_array[‘s’] = $query_string_array[‘search’]; // replace “s” with value of “search”
unset($query_string_array[‘search’]); // delete “search” from query string
}
return http_build_query($query_string_array, ”, ‘&’); // Return our modified query variables
}
add_filter(‘query_string’, ‘ds_swap_search_parameter’);As for whether or not these 404 errors will hurt your site, this article's a bit old, but 404 errors on pages that never existed on your site won't hurt your rankings. Howeverm if Google picks up a bunch of 404 errors on pages that are currently indexed, then expect your rankings to plummet. Still, get them fixed.
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html
Now, in your case where the URLs are showing up as permalinks as if they're posts on your site, add a honeypot to your site that detects users or bots searching for huge numbers of nonexistent pages and subsequently blocks them. There was a user on a webmaster forum who used a honeypot on his site for this purpose, so you should be able to as well.
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