404 errors in folders / in Webmaster Tools

Question

In Google Webmaster Tools for crawl errors, my 404 error number is called

www.domain.com/a 

There is no such thing on my site, and there is no link to it. What is wrong, what does it mean? There is no error in the site log related to 404 error pointing to / a. W3C does not report an error. What can I do?

Answer 1

Not you, it must be a Google robot. (none of this is related to php; maybe someone can remove the php tag. )

I have eight sites in my Google Webmaster Tools, and two completely unrelated sites show the same thing. No site showing this problem uses PHP.

The only thing I can think of is that the Google bot parses HTML incorrectly and somehow appends the closing "a" tags to the root URL. It sounds silly, but this is the only thing that can explain a few unrelated examples of this problem.

Has anyone else started a topic in the Google Forum?

I'm not sure what impact this will have on the root problem, but I put this in my htaccess file so I hope to clear the false 404 errors. ( Edit: this is the recommended solution from Google.)

 Redirect 301 /a http://www.mysite.com 

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EDIT:

Reported in the Google Help Forum:

http://www.google.com/support/forum

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EDIT 2:

Both sites are checked on W3C and do not use PHP.

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EDIT 3:

"/ a" comes from inside jQuery v1.5.2. This is the main reason.

Inside jQuery itself is this line ...

 <a href='/a' style='color:red;float:left;opacity:.55;'>a</a> 

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EDIT 4:

Lock it using the robots.txt file. (According to Google, this will change the content crawl error for webmasters from "404" to "Blocked robots.txt")

 Disallow: /a/ Disallow: /a 

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EDIT 5:

Below is a response from a Google employee JohnMu on this issue in a thread that I started on Google Groups . It looks like I will still stick to 301.

Johnmu

Google employee

4:39 AM

Hi guys

Just a short note about this - yes, we are building a "/ a" link for many sites from jQuery JavaScript. However, that is not a problem at all, if we see "/ a" as 404, then this is good for us. Like the other 404 URLs, we list it as a crawl error in Webmaster Tools, but again, that won't be a problem for crawling, indexing, or ranking. If you want to make sure that it does not cause a crawl error in Webmaster Tools, then I would recommend a total of 301 redirects to this URL on the main page (barring a URL will also open it as a crawl error - it will be listed as a URL address denied by robots.txt).

I would also not recommend explicitly banning scanning a jQuery file. Although we do not index it ourselves at all, we may need to access it in order to have a good moment. Previewing your site.

So, to summarize: if you see "/ a" in crawl errors in the Tools webmaster, you can simply leave it as if it would not cause any problems. If you want it to be deleted there, you can do 301 redirects to your home page.

Greetings

John

Answer 2

Check your Apache error logs. Or install a small PHP file that saves $_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"] as:

 <?php $f = fopen("logfile.txt", "a"); fwrite ($_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"] . "\n"); fclose ($f); 

Then create a .htaccess file to redirect calls to / a to this PHP:

 Options FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteRule ^a$ somthing.php 

Alternatively, you can save your PHP to the name /a/index.php , so you do not need to redirect.

Answer 3

Redirect 301 or otherwise remove the request to remove the URL from your webmaster account.

GWT → Site Configuration → Crawl Access → URL Removal Request