Non-Existing Page Actually Does Exist

Oh, I forgot.

Foundation 5 Framework
Running the reveal & topbar scripts that come packaged with it.

Plugins:
Advanced Custom Fields
Black Studio TinyMCE Editor
Contact Form 7
Custom Post Type UI
Google Analytics
Google Authenticator
MyLiveChat
Shortcodes Ultimate
Yoast SEO

Thanks for the additional details. Redirects are definitely causing the issue in this case. I did find a way to reproduce the problem on a basic WordPress installation, and will submit this to the dev team after a little more testing.

On your site you can probably avoid some of these redirects (and make the site respond a little faster) by linking directly to the full page path. For example, on the how-it-works page, instead of linking to /stage-2-signup-form/, you could link directly to /how-it-works/stage-2-signup-form/

I’ll post back when I have more details on a fix.

Hi Matt,

I updated the links but it didn’t seem to have an effect.
After all this playing around with it, I decided those signup forms would look better in their own window so added the “_blank” targeting to the links and it had the added benefit of alleviating those non-existent page errors. Which is a nice bonus!

So I started looking at the footer links that were also throwing this error. They aren’t nested into anything at all. First thing I did was replace the short links with the full url links and it worked! No more error message.

Might be important to note this is the first thing I tried with the nested links too, but it was the “_blank” target condition that cured the problem for those ones.

Then I started checking ALL the links on the page and found something strange….. There might actually be a problem with wordpress that is contributing to this. (WordPress did just update a few days ago)

On my Success Stories page, there were two links to signup forms that were also causing this error. I went to rename them and realized I hadn’t select success stories as the parent. When I did add Success Stories as the parent, I got my 404 page error. A real 404 error! Not just a wordfence error.

I played around. Created a few pages new pages with success stories as the parent and tried putting other pages as the parent. The pages all work fine EXCEPT when success stories is the parent page. Then it causes a real 404 error. I deleted the success stories page (in wordpress only) and made it again, but the problem persisted. Specifically and only related to placing that one page, success stories, as a parent.

Note: I didn’t go into the DB to delete the page, so it may be keeping a copy there and only deleting it from wordpress. But I thought it interesting enough to note here for you guys. Especially as the shortlinks are causing errors too. So maybe there is a possibility wordpress is contributing to this problem?

That is definitely unusual — I didn’t have any similar issues when testing the original problem with the false 404’s. It might have something to do with the custom post type plugin that you are using, but I am not sure. Another possibility might be having a category or tag with the same name as the “success stories” page. I think there is a Yoast SEO option that makes category names appear as the first item in a URL, which might be able to cause a conflict like that.

The shortlinks do cause the same type of redirect as the links without the parent page’s name included, so any fix we have for the original issue will fix those false 404’s as well.

Thanks!

I am marking this as resolved, since the 404 issue is being tracked in our internal system now, and it will be fixed in a future version of Wordfence. Thanks for the details that helped track down the issue!

-Matt R

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