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WordPress

Nathalie C
Nathalie C
2,594 Points
Posted by Nathalie C
Nathalie C
2,594 Points

Wordpress site , feed, & Google crawl errors

I'm just coming to the end of How to Build a Wordpress Theme project and gone live with my site. I've submitted a site map to google via google master web tools. I've noticed that it's thrown up 13 errors and counting (yesterday it had found 3), on taking a closer look they are all linked to the blog posts, tags and categories with /feed, which is bringing up a 404 error. I think wordpress must be automatically generating a feed but I have no idea how to control this or deal with the crawl errors. I don't think they will have an adverse effect overall on the site (I hope) but I really tried hard to keep the coding error free and am gutted these errors have appeared. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

3 Answers

Mirza Curevac
PLUS
Mirza Curevac
Courses Plus Student 14,294 Points
Mirza Curevac
Mirza Curevac
Courses Plus Student 14,294 Points

You could also use a plugin which basically sends all 404 if you don`t have a 404 page that handles them to the main page.

Try http://wordpress.org/plugins/404-to-start/

Matt Campbell
Matt Campbell
9,767 Points
Matt Campbell
Matt Campbell
9,767 Points

They're not errors and you don't need to worry about them. 404 errors have absolutely no adverse effect on Google Ranking or anything. All it is is that in the sitemap it says there's a page that isn't so Google's looking for it, can't find it, letting you know and moving on. The problem comes when Google can't find a page that DOES exist.

If you really want to sort it out, you can edit your robots.txt file to ignore those urls.

Nathalie C
Nathalie C
2,594 Points
Nathalie C
Nathalie C
2,594 Points

Hi guys thank you for your answers. I found an interesting link (although a bit old) from Matt Cutts

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-results-in-search-results/

So I've decided to use both your suggestions, creating a robots.txt file to disallow /feed and add custom 404 page which to be honest I should have done as standard practice anyway (oops rumbled)

Exciting to see how quickly the site is being indexed and interesting how social media and wordpress blog activity is indexed faster than the static pages.