404 monitor entries

Hello,

Thank you for contacting the support. We apologize for the delay and any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.

We do not have the necessary information on how or why they are generated. You can get further insight into them by enabling the advanced monitor at WordPress Dashboard > Rank Math > General Settings > 404 Monitor.
https://rankmath.com/kb/monitor-404-errors/#advanced-404-monitor

That will give you more information like the referrer and the user-agent. You can use that information to track down the source or find out if it is just bots generating those errors.

You can also add them to the exclusion list at WordPress Dashboard > Rank Math > General Settings > 404 Monitor > Exclude Paths

If you are seeing random 404s that you know for a fact are incorrect – it is likely generated by a bot and can be safely ignored. You could also use a service like Cloudflare to block out access to bots so they do not use up your server resources.

Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.

Hello,

Thanks for your reply!

The 404 monitor logs each and every broken link on your website that were either accessed by any visitors or bots. We only report the 404s. We do not have information on how or why they are generated.

Using the Advanced Mode (that you’ve enabled), you can get some more details about the 404 logs.

We have a great tutorial regarding fixing 404 errors: https://rankmath.com/kb/fix-404-errors/

what do bots actually do?

A web crawler, or spider, is a type of bot that’s typically operated by search engines like Google and Bing. Their purpose is to index the content of websites all across the Internet so that those websites can appear in search engine results.

For more details, you can have a look at these tutorials:
https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/crawling-indexing/
https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/technical-seo-library/search-engine-crawling/

Hope that helps.

Thanks!