Seemingly endless hits in RM’s 404 Monitor

#142718
  • Resolved Taipei Expats

    3 years, 11 months ago

    Rank Math free

    Hi there,

    After I seem to be getting endless 404 hits of old links (some as gar back as 2016), as well as old wp-content/uploads/image-name-jpg (as an imperfect example), along with minified css file paths

    Some are forum topic tags (that I changed months ago)

    all these hits are always just 1 or 2 and never again. – super rare are they 3 +

    all coming up in my Rank Math 404 monitor section. – I am now on about 80+ redirect rules but I am thinking none of these were done by humans, but also wonder why on earth they are being tried for since these many of which are gone with no ideal redirect page.

    At this rate I will end up with hundreds of redirect rules in Rank Math, and even wondering if it’s causing more harm than good (slowing down the site for example)…

    I appreciate it may not even be google, I tried googling these and nothing comes up to find them in search results.

    What is your advice? -> only care about the important ones? (my blogs URLs if I changed the name recently), stuff like that?

    What’s your suggestion, guys?

    Thanks ~

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Reinelle

    3 years, 11 months ago

    Hello,

    Thank you for contacting Rank Math and bringing your concern to our attention. I’m sorry for any inconvenience this issue may have caused you.

    Please note that we only report the 404s. We do not have 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 referrer and 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 fix these errors by redirecting them to a related page on your website:
    https://rankmath.com/kb/fix-404-errors/

    Or, you can add them to the exclusion list at WordPress Dashboard > Rank Math > General Settings > 404 Monitor > Exclude Paths

    I hope that helps. Thank you, and please don’t hesitate to contact us if you need further assistance.

    Taipei Expats

    3 years, 11 months ago

    Rank Math free

    Thank you,

    one last question that will help me resolve this – how to clear the hit count for the redirections I have made?

    I’m asking this because, if this is not high after a time period, I can then ignore the 404 error, clear out my unnecessary redirects, and carefully monitor my 404s from thereafter.

    Thanks

    Reinelle

    3 years, 11 months ago

    Hello,

    The data about hits is stored as a number in a single cell of the Redirections table row. It will never take more than a few bytes even if you get billions of hits on a single redirect. If you have 1,000 redirects each with 10,000 hits – even then we are talking about only a few MBs of data.

    If each hit were to be recorded as a separate hit (like it does for the Advanced 404 monitor), then it would be of concern but not for the redirections.

    With that said, we do not have an option to automatically flush the redirection hits because there isn’t much use-case for it anyway.

    I hope that helps. Thank you, and looking forward to helping you.

    Taipei Expats

    3 years, 11 months ago

    Rank Math free

    Reinelle,

    Thank you so much for the informative replies.

    That’s everything.

    Once again, thank you, and Rank Math, for being amazing.

    Super looking forward to the pro after i finish my Google Academy course 🙂

    Anas

    3 years, 11 months ago

    Rank Math business

    Hello,

    We are super happy that your issue is resolved. If you have any other questions in the future, know that we are here to help you.

    If you don’t mind me asking, could you please leave us a review (if you haven’t already) on https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/seo-by-rank-math/reviews/#new-post about your overall experience with Rank Math? We appreciate your time and patience.

    If you do have another question in the future, please feel free to create a new forum topic, and it will be our pleasure to assist you again.

    Thank you.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

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