Almost 100 404 not founds in my WMT

[Jacob Martus]

Hi everyone. For some reason my webmaster tools is showing almost 100 broken links on my website but they are all to things like this:
http://www.gamingtech.org/user/TheYoungTurks

Now, that link isn't even on my page...so I don't know how it could be linking to another page if that one doesn't even exist. I think it may have something to do with one or more of my wordpress plugins...but there have never been these errors before so that makes me wonder. I think its related to tubepress and maybe another plugin...

Also, it isn't very specific as to where these broken links are on my blog...so that makes fixing this a lot more difficult. I don't want all of these broken links to affect my reputation and ranking with Google, so I would like to fix it.

Is there any fix for this? Other than removing the plugin in question?

[Roey Pimentel]

I'm having the same issue. I deactivated Tubepress. How should I deal with the errors? Have you fixed this problem? I see you posted this in Feb. and did not get any more posts in this thread. Any help is appreciated.

Peace,

Roey.

[paulgl]

404's are more tough on your senses than anything.
Google really does not care much.
If they really bother you, best way is to actually
create a page that cannot be found.
Yes, 60+ is a little tedious.

If you can get over the sight of 404 errors, your
problem is licked.

Unfortunately, webmasters do not seem to like the
sight of any errors.

Google suggests that you make your 404 page with
some sort of look and feel that does not startle
a visitor. That is, a simple "not found" stock message will
scare off people. (keep in mind that for me, 99.99% of
404 errors are from search engines) You need some sort
of custom menu of links to get the visitor back on track.

Google even has a widget to put on your custom 404
page that will apparently try and find the closest match.
I have not used it, as I just have a navigation menu on
my 404 page. You can get google's help from:
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Make your 404 pages more useful
I have never used it as stated, and don't know if the widget still exists.
It should be in the google webmasters tools.

A custom 404 page would satisfy people and search engines.
Just turn your head when looking at the 404 errors and you'll
be set!

I don't use a robots.txt and google sure tries hard to find em.
Google will do strange things and assume that some pages are
there are try and crawl them.

In fact, you will probably never get all 404 errors to ever disappear.
Those nasty little typo errors, ya know.

Paul

[DanRMorris]

Roey,

Did you ever get that problem fixed? I'm seeing now that Tubepress is causing rampant 404 errors.

Originally Posted by Roey Pimentel

I'm having the same issue. I deactivated Tubepress. How should I deal with the errors? Have you fixed this problem? I see you posted this in Feb. and did not get any more posts in this thread. Any help is appreciated.

Peace,

Roey.

[yukon]

This will 301 redirect every single 404 you have now & anything in the future, to your Index page.

Open your Wordpress 404.php & replace everything with this code. This is the code I use on my own sites, it works good.

PHP Code:

<?php
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: ".get_bloginfo('url'));
exit();
?>

[Roey Pimentel]

Hi Dan,

I ended up removing Tubepress completely and used a plug in to redirect the errors to a funny 404 error page. I don't recall offhand which plug in I used, but it was still a tedious task. Paulgl makes a good point, but the volume of errors that were produced really bugged me, so I spent the time and cleaned them up. I hope you have an easier time :-)