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Error 404 (Page Not Found) For a brand new site

by cbnet
10 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I purchased a new domain name few days ago, set up a wp site and published one article. My site & article were indexed with in 24 hrs. Thereafter, I wrote another article, it too got indexed within 24 hrs. There after I set up webmaster tools for this new site. I have received following message from googles three times with a gap of two/three days between each message.

Quote:

"Google detected a significant increase in the number of URLs that return a 404 (Page Not Found) error. Investigating these errors and fixing them where appropriate ensures that Google can successfully crawl your site's pages."

Unquote

This is happening as some body earlier had a site by the same domain name, but his domain regn. got cancelled due to some reasons which I was not aware of earlier. But now this domainname.com & my aricles are duly indexed & are owned by me.

My question is what should I do about the Google's messages about errors 404. :confused:
#404 #brand #error #found #page #site
  • Profile picture of the author trevord92
    If you're using Wordpress, there are lots of plugins that will elegantly handle 404 errors and will redirect people rather than give them an error page.

    If you're good at the techie stuff then you can also handle 404 errors with your .htaccess file, just remember to make a backup copy of your current file as if you get it wrong, you can break things spectacularly. Redirecting to the main index page of the site is easiest but if you know what the previous content was, redirecting to a similar content page would be even better.

    If you're not using Wordpress but are on a host with Cpanel, the easiest way would be to go into control panel and select the Error Pages option. You can then handle the error pages so that they redirect to your main site (or wherever).
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  • Profile picture of the author atwheeler
    Hi Cbnet,

    How many pages are indexed in Google? You can perform a quick 'site:your domain.com' in the search, and then as trevord92 mentioned redirect them to pass the page rank juice.
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  • Profile picture of the author cbnet
    Only the pages I made myself are indexed by Google. The error 404 pages (pages not found) are not indexed by google now. These pages I never created. Their url are not indexed any more by google, that is why their url are showing error 404 by webmaster tools. May be these pages were created by the previous owner of the domain.

    An interesting case for study.
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  • Profile picture of the author trevord92
    If you're getting traffic to those pages, someone, somewhere is linking to them (not always the case, but certainly happens quite a lot).

    So put that traffic to use!

    If there's a clue in the page titles that used to exist, use that to create content.

    If not, at least send the user to your home page.
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  • Profile picture of the author cbnet
    @trevord92: What if those backlinks were created by blackhat technique by the previous owner. So if I redirect them to my site, will that not do harm to my site?
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  • Profile picture of the author trevord92
    From what you've said, they're already pointing to your site. If they were created with anything dodgy, any damage has already been done.

    Your log files should show them as referring sites so you should be able to work out whether they're good, bad or indifferent. But I'm guessing they're fairly OK if they are actually sending traffic.
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    • Profile picture of the author cbnet
      [QUOTE= Your log files should show them as referring sites so you should be able to work out whether they're good, bad or indifferent. But I'm guessing they're fairly OK if they are actually sending traffic.[/QUOTE]

      How I can check above. Please advise.
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  • Profile picture of the author kaytav
    I guess, redirecting the pages to your homepage would be a nice idea. It would help you get some visitors as well.
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  • Profile picture of the author trevord92
    Checking log files: if you've got Analytics set up (or possibly also in Webmaster tools) there's a good chance that will show the referring pages. I don't trust Google much so I don't use those!

    Control panel is where I normally go - you'll have a section called Logs and programs like Webalizer and AWStats which will give you the details. In AWStats, it's the section called "Links from an external page".
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Referring pages are from traffic that lands on your page, not incoming backlinks without traffic clicking the link.

    Do a sitewide 301 redirect for all 404s (catch all broken URLs). If your worried about the links built before you bought the domain, redirect the broken links to a dummy page like a Privacy Policy page that you don't care about ranking. If you start seeing the dummy page ranking then you know the links are good, reconsider If you want the links pointing at an internal money page. The reason I said internal page is, internal page URLs are easily replaceable If something goes wrong, you can't replace an Index page URL.
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