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Hi all,
So I just ran an audit on our website and it’s showing quite a few 404 page errors in Google Analytics.
However these aren’t my main pages. These are other odd pages. For instance /resources/glossary/labmanager/lib/inflate — I have no idea what that page is to. /glossary/labmanager does exist but I’m not sure what the trailing pages are for. What would you recommend I do with all of these pages? There are nearly 800 of them. Should I redirect them all to my main site or should I follow up on each one and resolve the 404? How would you guys handle something like this.
https://preview.redd.it/zm47a6jl4zjc1.png?width=1006&format=png&auto=webp&s=5d324da1c91675cbacce832c3a83353218d8b303
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I would run screaming frog and look to see where in incoming links come from to those pages. Then you might find an issue with the template or content, view source on the page generating the weird links. You might have a weird link on the pages that you need to add a no follow or no index on the link. Or add a rule for that pattern in your robots text file.
Would probably also Google that string and see if it’s anywhere else, the url looks like something is broken maybe a particular plugin has gone haywire… did you do an server, theme or plugin update, upgrade or add a new plugin etc in nov 2023?
Good luck!
This is Google Search Console, NOT Google Analytics. Very important distinction as GSC aims to help you understand how your site is performing and indexed by Google.
These types of 404s in GSC are common. It’s possible a previous iteration of your site used this structure if URL or its content that has since been deleted, or even a weird back link that Google crawled.
It doesn’t mean anything is wrong with your site.
However how to handle it can vary. I’d scan your site with Screaming Frog as other commenter said and see if there are any real internal 404s and fix those and redirect as needed.
Also I’d evaluate if you even need to bother with these. If there are backlinks to them definitely redirect, or if they are ranking for any keywords (probably not), or if they were real pages that the URL was changed or it was deleted.
Otherwise safe to ignore