I have recently noticed several visits to the page - 404.asp in my site. It seems to be the result of a search engine crawling my pages. It doesn't occur every time my site is visited by the SE.


I believe that it is some sort of error. Is this suspicion true?

Any thoughts or direction will help. I'm hoping that all is fine with the pages of my site and SEO efforts are not being thwarted as the result of this 404.asp occurence.

Thanks in advance.

I see this same exact issue on my stat reports. Is anyone else having this problem?

404 errors are "page not found" or bad link errors . It could occur if somone enters an invalid address for a page on your site.

Maybe a bot is looking for a typical file name that isn't on your site - e.g. index.html or default.html?

That's my guess at least...

BTW - I get them too but I'm not concerned as our link are all "good."

Hi All!!

I am SO glad that someone inquired about the 404.asp errors in the stats. I have them as well and the % is up in the 40-something range. How has everyone else's number (%) been?

Is this something to worry about or just let it be?

Beverly

same here

I'll look into the cause of this... I wouldn't worry. If you run a link checker and all comes back in the clear, your good.

Alrighty, then! Thanks Captain. It's nice to know you'll look into it.

It's pretty bad when we look at the stats (well, okay, when "I" look at my stats! LOL ) and realize which are "good" error codes and which are "bad" code numbers. Knowing that if the 404s, et al are in the high range then there could be the possibility of visitors being turned off/away from your site; hence a potential for lost sales.

Once again, thanks Captain!

Beverly

To continue this thread....

Captain (or anyone else) - How do I run a link check?

Captain, did you find out any info on this error? I see this page visited almost daily and would hate to think that I am losing a sale when a customer encounters this error.

Thanks for the help.

MGriffin-

There is a small program you can download that spiders your site to see if you have bad links located at http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

This should help for that. Captain may know of others.

The 404.asp page is the default location the site goes when something is not there that it is looking for. The link checker is one thing that can help in order to make sure one link on your site isn't going just nowhere. Also, you may want to throw up an index.html page onto your site. I've seen that decrease the number of 404's that occur.

sabres00,

Thanks for the info.

I do not not know what an index page is or how to incorporate it into the content of my site. Can you elaborate?

Your index page is the page people see when they type in www.yoursite.com. Its your very front page.
I would like to find out more about 404.asp also because I test my links and rarely find any broken, I think there is more to it.
But, I am glad Captain is looking into this.

MGriffin and Strapworks-

Strapworks is correct, in that the server is looking for the index.htm page first. Then, if you do not have one, it goes from there. The reason I suggest adding one (which you would need to do via the FTP manager into your root directory) is that if it is not there, then it tries to find something else (eventually store.asp). I suspect that may be part of the cause of the 404.asp pages coming up. If it finds what the server tells it it is looking for first, I feel there may be a decrease in 404.asp page views (though I highly doubt this is even half it, just a part).

Also, the reason you are seeing these recently and not before was that recently we made an all-server-wide change to have the 404.asp page come up instead of the default page not found server page that used to come up. This does two things. The first is that it keeps your customers in the cart if they go to a bad page. Sometimes things change and a link may be bad, and you could have an advertisement that you forgot to change... This will keep your customer in the cart at least, which makes you have potential for them to keep shopping. With the old page, they would think (at least I do when I see it) that the site does not exist anymore, and just continue on. The other thing it does is that it makes your 404 hits appear on your top pages list. I believe (though am uncertain at this point) that many of these 404's occur when Google is spidering the site. Unfortunately, there is no current way to know for certain why this occurs, nor what it is looking for, but I suspect this would be the cause. These 404's were visible to you before, just in a different location where not many people checked. It was located under the Referrals > Referral Errors Menu. If you scroll back to the beginning of July, you will see all of a sudden there are 404 errors that show. There may not be as many as 404 page views, though, because the spiders can still crawl through once they hit 404.asp since there are links there for it to go through. This would not be possible with the old 404 error, so the spider would just move on.

We are still investigating all the pros and cons to this change, especially how it relates to search engines and placement. A definite con is that it raises more eyebrows since it is much more evident in Urchin that something is going on where something is not hitting your site like it thinks it should. If we find any adverse affects to this, we will change it. Conversely, if we find that there is more we can do after analyzing, we will definitely implement. Version 4.0 is going to implement other search engine optimization tactics to propel sites higher in their respective rankings, and I'm sure with the information we accumulate from then until now, we will find the most efficient and search engine friendly way to implement how a 404 error gets processed.

Wow Sabre, that is a great idea to have 404 come up and keep them in the store than to have them see a white screen error. I can see customers also thinking that the site doesn't exist and going back to another google listing.
I am glad comes up with this stuff, thats what I like about you guys (and girls).