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#1 2007-09-20 11:16:51

gerhard01
Plugin Author
Registered: 2006-12-07
Posts: 108

Strange 404 errors

Scrolling through my logs, I stumble upon recurring systematic 404 page not found errors:

They all are caused by wrong URLs http://mysite/article%20class=l where the correct URL would be http://mysite/article. I could not find any cause related to malformed links on my side. So I googled for ‘%20class=l’ and found quite a bunch of sites with similar URLs that lead to a 404 error.

Can somebody figure out what’s going on here?

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#2 2007-09-20 12:20:56

wet
Developer Emeritus
From: Schoerfling, Austria
Registered: 2005-06-06
Posts: 3,330
Website Mastodon

Re: Strange 404 errors

One shouldn’t expect all spambots or search engine spiders to parse all HTML correctly. Sometimes they err, and then they hit an inexistent page.

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#3 2007-09-20 13:26:40

Gocom
Developer Emeritus
From: Helsinki, Finland
Registered: 2006-07-14
Posts: 4,533
Website

Re: Strange 404 errors

Or it also could be that you have unclosed tag (or attribute) on your page (in txp’s template forms), like ie:

<a href="<txp:permlink /> class="l" /><txp:title /></txp:permlink>

And then search bots (and some regular users in some cases) are trying to using it – and causing 404-errors. And if Google have indexed it, seems like it is case of unclosed attribute. As Google is too developed searchengine to make that kind of a mistake. Or it should not make, if your error pages are formed corretly (including the error statusmessage in title etc.)

And if so is, you should fix that quickly. Because if that continues you could & would end up in the sandbox of search engines, meaning that you would get less hits by searchs and in the end lowered page rank – and even in the worst case a ban for a period time. Why? Because of too many errors, not-found pages and uncorrect links – spam in other words.

Cheers!

Last edited by Gocom (2007-09-20 13:37:23)

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#4 2007-09-20 14:36:08

gerhard01
Plugin Author
Registered: 2006-12-07
Posts: 108

Re: Strange 404 errors

Gocom wrote:

Or it also could be that you have unclosed tag (or attribute) on your page (in txp’s template forms), like ie:

I could not locate such an error in my forms or any other links – yet. Actually I am rather confident that this error is not caused by me because these errors occur just now and then on some pages where I use the very same forms as for all other articles. And then, I have no class=“1” in my CSS. I will have a closer look at the IPs causing these errors – maybe I can see some pattern.

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