Getting 404s for a PDF file for every tag on the site

  • Resolved lillylark

    (@lillylark)


    1 year, 5 months ago

    I don’t understand why this is happening. There is a page called About Us. It has no tags for it. It contains a link to a PDF file for the “Accessible Techcomm promotional brochure“. The PDF file doesn’t have any tags. I started getting 404s for this PDF file with a few tags that I just redirected to the About Us page. But I just realized that there are no tags for that page. The 404s are piling up and are now over 304 individual hits. And now I’m also getting them for categories. A list of sample 404 captures is at https://accessible-techcomm.org/strange-tag-related-404s.txt

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Author Aaron

    (@aaron13100)

    I don’t know why you’re getting those 404s either. Unfortunately the plugin can only record the 404s and can’t tell you why or where they came from. The best we can do is look at the Logs tab and look at the “Referrer” column to see if there’s any information there.

    Thread Starter lillylark

    (@lillylark)

    How do I send you a copy of the Log file? Some of the 404s have referrers but the ones for the pdf file don’t have referrers.

    Plugin Author Aaron

    (@aaron13100)

    I was able to view the log file on your site.

    As I said though, there are no values in the referrer (or “referer”) field, so we can’t tell where the requests came from or why they’re happening. I’m not sure what else you’d like me to look at specifically.

    You could ignore the 404s.

    You could setup a regular expression redirect that looks for that pdf file and redirects people to somewhere (the pdf file or the about page or whatever).

    You could search the database table wp_posts for references to that file.

    You could use a tool like https://validator.w3.org/checklink to check for broken links, which may or may not include a reference to the file.

    Plugin Author Aaron

    (@aaron13100)

    Let me know if there’s anything else.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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