Google Page Indexing Issues

[Bikerdave]

Hi, I hope that this is allowed.

Google is telling me there are 404 errors on a site that I maintain and provides me with URL's (examples?). I have crawled the site with Screaming Frog and get no errors at all. Its only a tiny site, so I have been through every line of code, links, trashed and unpublished articles, the lot. I've done the Validation and still Google thinks there are 404 errors.

Can anyone point me in the right direction to perhaps an online tool or an experience that is similar to this as I have no idea how to fix something I can't seem to find.

Thanks

David

[remi111]

Is there any chance of being an SSL issue? Google is crawling the https version (or vice versa), and your other tool is using the other http/https version? Just spit-balling but could be something.

[Bikerdave]

At this stage anything is worth looking at and I will follow it up, thank you.

[remi111]

One more thing I was thinking, verify the sitemap.xml you've provided to Google Search Console is up to date. It's unlikely this is the case, but if you have an error in a sitemap or an outdated sitemap, Google could be trying to find a URL that doesn't exist. If you're using a tool to auto-generate sitemaps this is unlikely to be the issue, but any manually generated sitemaps that have a simple misspelling or a "-" instead of an "_" in the URL might pass the eyeball test on first glance looking for errors, but possibly could be a hidden gremlin.

One other thought could be to verify internal links don't have any typos and see if there's some page that has a misspelled internal link. This could be the case if you haven't provided a sitemap to Google Search Console at all, and it's trying to determine your URL hierarchy based on the internal links you have in the site/menus.

Actually one more thought, you can use Joomla Redirects Component to see 404 errors, and the Joomla redirects component to fix them. This blog is really good:

https://www.joomla-monster.com/document ... -on-joomla

The Joomla redirects plugin will show the referring page and you can find the offending link. There might be other plugins that do the same with more detail so you can see when GoogleBot comes in for a scan. But put some good 404 logging in place and run another verification with Google to see what it's hitting as 404 and how it's landing there.

Hopefully one of these works.

[samanthabrown]

Google Page Indexing Issues refer to problems encountered by webmasters or site owners that prevent Google's crawler from finding and indexing their site's pages. These issues can include thin or low-quality pages, non-unique content, crawl errors, technical problems such as incorrect canonicalization or incorrect HTTP status codes, and more.

[Ennovative]

Maybe there are old external links pointing to urls that don't exist? You can of course make manual redirects for the 404-errors Google mentions.

[MichaelGrd]

Hello,
Do you find the pages when you do site: ?

[Bikerdave]

Hello,
Do you find the pages when you do site: ?

Hi, no I have not been able to sort it out yet. I suspect its to do with canonical urls and I haven't had time to dig deeper.

I will post a solution if I ever find one!