#5204 – 404 Requests

Hi

The site is getting over 100 404 requests each day for courses that are historic that cease to be published after the course date.



The URLS's for the course look like this https://www.xxxx.co.uk/book-a-course/10-first-aid-at-work-requal-2-day-14-15-11-2016/individual-registration and the source of the page request is a Google, Bing or other bot on each occasions.



We have never promoted individual courses on social media etc. so I guess this is literally the search engines trying to revisit a page indexed previously, if that is how it works.



Is this affecting ranking etc. and because there is a 404 request logged, does that mean the custom 404 error page has popped up offering alternatives, or that no alternatives were found etc.?

This is absolutely normal and expected and is indeed how search engines handle 404: they very quickly remove it from their index and response to queries, but they also come back regularly - usually at least during a year - to check of that 404 was not a temporary mistake.

This will in no way harm your site rankings or performance and is the right thing to do from an SEO perspective for content that is not available anymore.

Other 404 requests include themes/templatename/favicon.ico etc. or some images. Why does this happen when I haven't change template?

Hard to say without looking actual individual examples - which is of course not part of our support.

There are basically only 2 types of 404s:

- those that originates from your own site ( you created a bad link, or you removed some content but you left some links to it on your own site). sh404SEF show those as "Internal"
- those coming from the outside, search engines, other bots, links from other sites with incorrect URLs. We call them "external"

You should find and fix internal 404. They will not harm your ranking at all but they will probably provide a poor user experience to your visitors.

There is nothing to do about external URLs, they are not under your control and do no harm except wasting a bit of server resources. If some happen too often, you may want to block them with sh404SEF URL blocker. Again, those 404 will have no SEO effect.

Even if it hadn't been, the events once they pass in the component are still technically published, but they are set not to display in the front end otherwise they would show up on search in the site.

The important think is whether requesting their URL in a browser generate a 404 or not. If Yes, all is good and this is the recommended way to go for SEO purposes.

Now to provide a better experience to your visitors who land on such a page, you may want to redirect them to a specific page that says "This course is not available any longer, click here to see all our current course" and link that to your courses start page.

This will be a better experience for visitors - but no SEO effect.

Best regards

Hi

However if I click a link to book a course under a sub heading, let's say "first aid at work" the URL becomes /94-first-aid-at-work-3-day-29-10-2018-31-10-2018 rather than /book-a-course/94-first-aid-at-work-3-day-29-10-2018-31-10-2018 as it did prior to installing sh404SEF.

That's also expected. sh404SEF does not build URLs the same way as Joomla. Joomla bases URLs on menu items which is not considered a good practice as URLs for the same piece of content.
sh404SEF usually builds URLs based on the item characteristics such as the category(ies) it belongs to and its title. In that case, those pages are not coming from Joomla but from a 3rd-party component so URLs content is still decided by the component itself.

Is there anyway to force that URL to become book-a-course/94-first-aid-at-work-3-day-29-10-2018-31-10-2018 as it did prior to installing sh404SEF as it was pre-installation of your component, as there are published courses that are indexed with that URL already?

You can do the following:

- go to "By component" tab of sh404SEF configuration and locate the line where your course component is listed
- The first drop down will read "Use default handler". Leave it like that.
- the second drop down will read "Use sh404SEF plugin if available". Change that to "User router.php with menu item" then save
- Go to the sh404SEF URL manager and delete all URLs that exist for this component. Or maybe just start with one single URL such as "94-first-aid-at-work-3-day-29-10-2018-31-10-2018" as a test
- Visit your home page and navigate again to that page to see how the URL was created.

If all ok on that test, then delete the remaining URLs you want to change structure for. The new URLs will be created back as people navigate the site.

Best regards

Hi

1 -

I enabled the above to use the default Joomla router

That's not at all what I suggested above. Is this is shortcut to mean "I did what you suggested above" or did you really set the 1st drop down to "Use Joomla router" instead of the recommended "Use default handler"?

2 - Did you purge/delete all URLs involved at each change of the "By component" configuration changes so that old URLs are forgotten and new ones are created according to the new settings?

3 - What you see with the URL being different suggests that the settings were not restored exactly the same. Otherwise the URLs would be the same.

4 -

Any idea what causes the category to appear in the title tabs purely relating to Event Booking?

Page titles for Page Booking are entirely created by Event Booking, sh404SEF does not provide any specific support for it. You can manually override any page title on a per URL basis of course, from the URL manager.

Best regards

HI

Ok good. Is this considered solved or do you have more questions?

Best regards

Hi

Cool! Closing this ticket now, feel free to open a new one as needed. If you do so, please mention this ticket number in the new one.

If you created any superadmin account for us, be sure to delete or block it now to avoid unnecessary risk in the future.

Be sure to also check out wbAMP, our new Accelerated Mobiles pages plugin for Joomla - the next big thing is SEO, direct from Google themselves!



Best regards