: Webmaster Tools is throwing out 404 errors on link not on page Webmaster Tools is showing thousands of 404 errors, where pages on the site are referring to another incorrect URL. For example,
Webmaster Tools is showing thousands of 404 errors, where pages on the site are referring to another incorrect URL. For example, URL not found example.com/shop/=, linked from example.com/shop/gift-voucher and example.com/shop/special-plant-offers.
I obviously have checked the source and cannot find any references to this link on any page.
The only consistent issue is that it only seems to report this error on pages with two section i.e. example.com/shop does not report any error whilst all pages with example.com/shop/xxx (where xxx can be several different pages such as gift-voucher) all report this.
I cannot seem to duplicate this error. I have run a link checker (we use Screaming Frog) and it does not report this error. I have fetched these pages as a bot, and these do not report this error.
I am at a total loss. I cannot even duplicate the issue, but it is most definitely an issue, as Webmaster Tools is reporting new errors every day.
Is this perhaps Google bot doing its own thing?
More posts by @Deb1703797
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Two thoughts
Can you enforce a trailing slash on your URLs. For example, example.com/shop/special-plant-offers/ (Sorry, it's 2:30 am and I just forgot the explanation for why this might work.)
The equal sign "=" looks suspiciously like a special character to me. A) I have had a few problems with copy and paste code containing weird unicode that was invisible to the naked eye. Typing the URLs or code by hand fixed the problem. B) Is your file actually encoded as UTF8 w/o BOM? C) Does your <head> declare the proper charset? D) Does your server's response header properly identify the actual charset of the served document?
I cannot verify this authoritatively, but based on my own observations I'm going to hypothesise that once Google has cached a page, it will continue for some time to follow links from its own cached version of the page rather than from the live version of the page.
As far as I can see, the two quickest ways to get around this are:
1) to re-fetch the live version of the page in Google Webmaster Tools, so that the Google cache has an up-to-date copy of the live page; or
2) to update mod_rewrite rules in .htaccess, so that when Google tries to follow an outdated link to a non-existent location, it is automatically redirected by the server to an existing location.
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