#5864 – 404 redirect not working

Hi

https://xxxx.com.au/table/

with the page title:

"The page you requested was not found on our site"



What is going wrong here?

Nothing. It seems absolutely normal that no redirect happen in that case. A redirect on 404 will only happen if we find a suitable page to redirect to. That is if we find a page which URLs looks similar to the requested one. In the case of /table, it's unlikely you have a page that "looks" similar.

1 - The first problem on your site is that the 404 is not correctly displayed. This is because it is displayed using the Home page menu item. Because of that your template removes the 404 error page content so you should change that to use another existing menu item, for instance that of the "About us" page. You can change that on the "Error page" tab of sh404SEF configuration:



2 - Make sure the "Similar URLs" plugin is enabled

3 - We do not recommend enabling "Try to autoredirect 404". This is a very poor experience for users in many cases. Having a 404 when a page does not exist is fine and normal, except in cases where you know a URL has changed. In those cases, you should set up an actual redirect for that URL change.

Best regards

Hi

https://xxxx.com.au/blog/data-security-vs-data-privacy

Is this URL found in the SEF URL database?

Best regards

Hi

So I ran the following test:

- Tried to reach https://xxxx.com.au/partner. The error page correctly displays the similar URL, /partners

- Tried to reach /news/data-security-vs-data-privacy. The error page is NOT displayed and instead I am redirected to the URL /table

So the problem is not with the 404 auto-redirect feature. The problem comes from either:

- having enabled "301 redirect from Joomla SEF to sh404SEF" under the "Advanced" tab of sh404SEF configuration.
- having at least one component set to "Use Joomla router" under the "By component" tab of sh404SEF configuation
- having set a generic redirect rule (alias) for the /table URL.

If any of the above apply, please revert those settings to their default values to prevent this redirect to happen.

Of course, I have only mentioned possible reasons internal to sh404SEF. Such redirect could also have been set up through .htaccess or similar.

Best regards

Hi

newsfeeds under by component is set as Leave as non-sef, Use Joomsef plugin, this was to ensure rss feeds did not change formatting

Leave as non-SEF is fine, it's only "Use Joomla router" that kills things because, well, it uses the Joomla router.

Do you create the blue popup at the base as well as the article text?

Yes. If you enable "Try to auto-redirect 404" (which we do not recommend really), displaying this warning is strongly recommended because sometimes sh404SEF may select an irrelevant redirect target and a user can be sent to a page that's different from what they were expecting. So it's way better to tell them that previous page does not exist anymore but we are suggesting one for them.

Also any suggestions when running RSSEO and sh404sef side by side? (both have 404 logs, both have analytics, etc

Nope. A question though: what do you use RSSeo for in practice, like the most important feature for you?

Best regards

Hi

it was interesting that the results in the article vs in the popup were different url's with the popup being more relevant, hence the question.

The results should be the same except for the 1st one: when doing the automatic redirect, the 1st result is used to do the redirect to, so it's not displayed on the list and therefore another one is added instead.

Many thanks for the detailed recap on RSSEO usage. Here are a few comments:

For sh404sef, it is mostly the automatic url redirects but honestly, I have not had much of a chance to check out the whole product in recent years. I did use it extensively back in 2012ish and loved it. What is your favourite part of sh404sef that I should check out as my next priority??

Of your list, 1 and 4 exists in sh404SEF, with the 404 error log being very strong.
The manual redirect and canonical tool is also very strong with simple generic redirects/canonical easy to use.

We also automatically compute and inject:
- page level structured data (breadcrumbs, sitelink search, organization, social profiles)
- Open graph and Twitter cards
- Google Analytics and Tag manager injection with exclusion, per group, IP, ..

And of course the URL generation itself, designed from the ground up to avoid Joomla duplicate content issue!

The sitemap thing is a complex one. Doing a sitemap is simple but doing it well for SEO, not that much. First, most sites don't actually need a dynamic sitemap. If your site has 2 or 3000 pages and those pages can be crawled from menus and such, you should never had any crawl budget or similar issue. Just submit a sitemap made by an online tool when the site launch, or if you make major changes and you're fine. Siteamp extensions use a lot of resources usually and many sites just don't need them unless they have uncrawlable pages - but that's another problem that be fixed.

Now for larger sites, sitemap can be very useful but you need to be sure you put only the "most wanted" pages in it, so as to indicate to search engines which ones you want them to focus on. Most sitemap extensions work hard on getting more pages into the sitemap while I am working on getting less pages listed in them. But I have not found a simple and user-friendly way of doing that so I've skipped the sitemap part in sh404SEF so far. I definitely plan on adding it to sh404SEF 5 though.

Do you find Alexa to be a reliable source for ranking - in relation to Google and Bing rankings ?

Also side note, I seem to be having some odd forming of url's when I have J! SEF or sh404sef turned on, it is taking the SEF part and then adding the image location:

This indicates that you have some relative images URL in your page source code, ie an image included as:

<img src="/path/to/image.jpg">

This is incorrect as this instructs the browser to try load the image from https://site.com/current-page/url/path/to/image.jpg. The img tag should read:

<img src="/path/to/image.jpg">

Also, I understand you might be a bit bias here, but Mobile First, wbAmp or Progressive Web App for mobile traction and SEO?

Well most likely your site is crawled as mobile first by Google by now so this means:

- absolutely all your content should be available on the mobile version if you want it to be indexed and rank
- you can get away with having some hidden content (like behind tabs) on mobile content but really you should not cause they still consider that not so good.

So you should build your site as mobile first, even if the majority of your visitors are not on mobile (we have less than 5% mobile visitors here and at weeblrpress.com for instance).

As for PWA and AMP, they are not really related - although they actually work very well together. AMP has 1st class support for PWA.

- PWA will not really have any effect on SEO. In its simplest form you can use it to speed up your site which is always good but probably won't make you outrank all your competition unless your site is extremely slow today
- AMP is the easy and quick way to get a large SEO boost, especially if you have lots of mobile visitors - or don't have but want to get more! The trick with AMP is that you need to do it well: your AMP pages should look good and have most if not all of the features of your regular pages (contact form, commenting, search, add to cart, subscribe to newsletter, sharing buttons, etc)
The gain is 2 folds: you get more traffic because your AMP pages are more visible in Google and Bing search results. And you get more engagement from them but that's only possible if you have all the features of your regular sites. The amount of work depends on your site, it can require custom coding sometimes.

Thanks again for the RSSEO recap!

Best regards

Hi

OK, thanks for input! 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.

Best regards