Our recommendation is to investigate the cause for those 404 errors. You’ll need to check in Google Search Console where those URLs are linked from. To do so, please go to “Crawl > Crawl Errors”, click on the crawl error and review the ‘Linked from’ tab (see screenshot). If the 404 error is linked from within your website, you will need to inspect the linking page and correct the invalid link. Please, refer to this post for more information about 404 errors: https://yoast.com/404-error-pages-checking/
Hi @monbauza
Yes, I have checked everything.
Actually, the 404 errors are for the URLs such as http://www.example.com/my-page-goes-here/3/3
These URLs are linked from the posts such as http://www.example.com/my-page-goes-here/3
In actual scenario, there are no such physical posts. Even such pages are not included in the sitemap. Although Google is able to crawl it. 🙁 🙁
I have about 175+ blog posts. For almost all of the blog posts such instances are created.
Hence, I got 404 errors in Google Webmasters.
I am clueless on what to do next?
Today, I have again updated to Yoast 5.6
Hello,
We are not sure where these links could be coming from, but we have not received any reports for this error from other users. Perhaps the error was temporarily introduced by another plugin or your theme?
If the links cannot be found anywhere on your site, you can safely ignore these 404 errors. We understand that you are worried about these 404 errors on your page. However, we want to point out they are a perfectly normal part of the web; the Internet is always changing, new content is born, old content dies, and when it dies it (ideally) returns a 404 HTTP response code. Search engines are aware of this.
If the pages that no longer exist have an equivalent page with similar content on your site, you may also wish to redirect these old URLs to the new ones on your site using a 301 redirect.
If the 404 errors correspond to pages or resources that don’t exist anymore on your website, then it’s fine to return a 404 status code for those URLs. Google will eventually stop crawling your deleted page and stop showing 404 errors for your old URLs. Alternatively, you can implement a 410 Content Deleted redirect. While you cannot implement redirects using the Yoast free plugin, you can certainly do it using your website’s htaccess file.
You can find useful advice on how to handle deleted content on this post: https://yoast.com/deleting-pages-from-your-site/
Hi @marcanor
I will have a look on what best could be done.
I understand that showing 404 errors on Google Webmaster Tools doesn’t effect on overall ranking of other pages, however, I am trying to minimize the 404 errors.
I could install another plugin to manage the redirect URLs, however, this is treated like applying a patch on a problem and not fixing from its root cause.
Let me see incase there are any other plugins affecting.
Many thanks.
We understand your concern and you want to minimize the 404 HTTP crawl errors on your site. We’re not aware of such issues in our plugin, this might be an issue specific to your setup and we’re not sure the exact source of the issue.
Plugin Support
Jerlyn
(@jerparx)
Closed due to inactivity.
