Hello,
It can be someone or a bot trying to look for weaknesses in your site. To secure your site, you should have a security plugin installed.
Please note we can only tell you about the 404s. We don’t know where they are coming from. You have to check that yourself.
Here’s how to fix the 404s with Rank Math.
https://rankmath.com/kb/fix-404-errors/
Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.
I do have a security plugin installed so no worries there. The referrer on all of them are google.com (that’s not what my question is). I am aware of how to fix 404 errors, but have no idea what this URI is supposed to be that is supposedly giving the 404 error? Which is my question.
I tried posting it in the Facebook group and it was denied stating that I needed to post it here since it is a support request related to the plugin itself.
Hello,
About it, the referer can be a signal to help us analyze the issue. There is a post on the official Google forums that I think you might find interesting: https://support.google.com/webmasters/forum/AAAA2Jdx3sURvqAOc1dczc/?hl=es
Looking forward to help you.
So far the referrers are Google.com and Bing.com; it usually does not have a blank.html after google.com, so the above link doesn’t really help much. It says that the URI requested is ^.* which is what my question is about. What URI is ^.* and why is it giving a 404 error?
I have looked in my server logs and there are no 404 errors that correspond to all of these within the 404 Monitor of the plugin (and there are A LOT).
Hello,
The complete URL will be your_site_domain/^.* which if you try to access even by adding it to your browser address bar, it will result to a 404 page.
From what I see it seems someone or a bot trying to access or create some kind of subdomains on your domain. Since you are all set with security, this should not result to any issue on your site. You should also check in with your host to ensure they have setup domain security.
Please note that the monitor is only there to detect and help you redirect the 404. As for the cause of the 404, we can’t always tell.
Looking forward to helping you. Thank you.
So I figured out what this issue was. It is not a security issue at all (no one was trying to access or create a subdomain on my domain). I have hotlink protection turned on for my server and I had set it to redirect to ^.* whenever a hotlink to an image has occurred. No idea why I ever set it to that, but I have changed to it just redirect to my 404 page.
Hello,
Thank you for the info.
Let us know if you have any further question(s) or if we can close this thread. Thank you.
This thread can be closed.
Hello,
We are glad your issue is now resolved.
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.
