So many entries in the 404s page

@damyan90

From my own experience I can tell you that I had a client with a similar situation.
When looking at the logs, a lot to the 404s were bot originated, meaning that there were bots looking for file vulnerabilities and when that file was not found a 404 was returned.

This turned out to be a great asset for us as we were able to harden the security on the site better, turning the unwanted 404s into 403s responses.

Also it’s very common on new sites to see this as you might have inherited a website with an IP address that had probably had a past from being hacked or an issue with your permalinks.

But I don’t see the option to turn the 404s in 403s. And also, how am I supposed to change 4,000 responses manually and handle the upcoming, which are about 700 per day?

Another question, if bots crawl my website, how come this does not reflect analystics?

There is no option to turn a 404 into a 403. This is something you would need to do yourself based on the context of your site and the errors.

You don’t need to handle 4000 responses. The 404 log shows all the 404 requests made to your site. It is not supposed to be a checklist of things to fix. A lot of the entries will be bots, and these you can ignore – they don’t need to be fixed.

A bot may not trigger your analytics.