Hello,
Thank you for contacting Rank Math and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.
When you see a 404 on your website, that actually means someone or a bot is trying to access your website at https://example.com/https://example.com. You can simply ignore this error, there’s nothing to worry about it.
Rank Math only reports on the 404s. Rank Math doesn’t cause them and cannot stop them as we do not have information on how or why they are generated.
To monitor and fix these errors, you can refer to the following articles:
We hope that helps. We are here if you need us again.
Thank you
I understand all that. My question is, how can a referrer be a 404 on my own site? Is that a bot acting like it’s my site? Can it do that?
Hello,
It could be that there are internal links within your site that are still pointing to a 404 page. Could you please check that? It could be in a menu or inside of a post.
If that isn’t the case, please clear your website cache and see if that resolves the issue.
Looking forward to helping you.
Hi there, I cleared and turned off caching, and I’m still getting 404s, one every min or so, from pages that don’t exist on my site.
The 404 and the referrer are the same page.
Most of them are repeating. How do I find the referring if it’s from a 404 on my site?
Hello,
Could you please give us the screenshot of 404 Monitor Log?
Looking forward to helping you. Thank you.
Sure – here is a full page capture, so you can see the urls.
Strange, right?
https://ibb.co/QP4WgY6
Thank you!!
Hello,
A referrer from your website only means that the user/bot was on the specified referrer page before getting on the 404 page.
As previously mentioned by my colleague, this can be due to the presence of an invalid URL on the referer page or if the user/bot simply accessed the mentioned 404 URL while being on the referer page.
However, as we only report the 404s. We do not have information on how or why they are generated.
Hope that helps.
Thank you.
I would really like it if you would look again.
https://ibb.co/sv2WQfM
(Smaller image)
And you can see, the referrer and the 404 are the same url.
This is a bot, yes? Can I isolate it?
Hello,
You can install any security plugin to block the unwanted bots from entering your website. You can install plugin such as Word fence plugin.
You can learn more about here
Hope that helps. Thank you and please don’t hesitate to contact us if you need further assistance.
You didn’t answer. What are these? Are they bots that mask as a non-existent page? Do you know?
Hello,
If you look closely, the user agents don’t seem to look like a bot but if you inspect the Access time, these user agents are trying to access these URLs every 1-5 seconds so it is possible that these are bots.
But with that said, as mentioned by my colleague in the previous reply, we only report the 404s. We do not have information on how or why they are generated.
You can fix these errors by redirecting them to a related page on your website: https://rankmath.com/kb/fix-404-errors/
To exclude URLs or any path from your website, you can do it here: WordPress Dashboard > Rank Math > General Settings > 404 Monitor > Exclude Paths
https://i.rankmath.com/O2vmci
I hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.
Hello,
Since we did not hear back from you for 15 days, we are assuming that you found the solution. We are closing this support ticket.
If you still need assistance or any other help, please feel free to open a new support ticket, and we will be more than happy to assist.
Thank you.
