what is 404 error and why do i have so many?
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hi.. naive blogger here…
Google analytics says..i have loads of 404 error in my blogs, what are they? how are they generated? and how do i remove them ?
Thanks for the help :)The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Ways to get 404 errors:
Publish a post or page and then delete it
Publish a post and then change the date
Publish a post or page and then change the URL slug (end part of URL)
Delete images from your media library that have been published in pages or posts
Move a post from one category to another
Delete a category from a published post
Delete a tag from a published post
Delete a category from your site
Delete a tag from your site
Convert all your categories to tags
Convert all your tags to categoriesI’m sure there are at least half a dozen more.
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Are you talking about http://crazycutiepie.wordpress.com/ ? If so, how are you getting Google Analytics to work on it? Do you mean Google Webmaster Reports?
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You can use the URL removal feature over at GWT, but the g00g is fickle and doesn’t always pay any attention to what you ask for.
Other than that, wait it out and sometime in the next 6 months to a year they should, possibly, maybe – or not – disappear. I had one client site that I worked tirelessly on for nearly 3 months trying to get rid of 404s. They would disappear then be back in a week or two. I finally gave up and I noticed the other day that the client’s site is now down to only two 404 errors (neither of which are broken links by the way).
Google long ago lost any shine they might have had with me. They are now just a necessary evil.
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But see here:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1269119Don’t use the URL tool to get rid of pages [… t]o clean up cruft, like old pages that 404. The tool is intended for URLs that urgently need to be removed, such as confidential data that was accidentally exposed. If you recently made changes to your site and now have some outdated URLs in the index, Google’s crawlers will see this as we recrawl your URLs, and those pages will naturally drop out of our search results over time. There’s no need to request an urgent removal through this tool.
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Google is full of it – I just got busted for new 404 errors based on a Post I made two years ago in the WordPress.ORG support forum that referenced a test blog I had on my old site – suddenly Google dug the old reference and flagged me for more 404 errors – I moved my site almost 1.5 years ago and Google still has not figured out that I moved and the old //my-site/wordpress/ or my-site/old-directories don’t exist –
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And without access to the robots.txt file I can’t block access to the directories that don’t exist anymore – so I just go the the Webmaster tools and put in all the 404 errors every week since Google seems to forget what they were ask to exclude in a few days –
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