Anyone ever come across this type of Google crawl error?

Marketing
1

Hi all,

Google Analytics has been suggesting for ages now that the following type of crawl error exists from 100 pages on my site (supposedly they link to this link which returns a 404).

It’s syntax is like this:
http://www.domain.com/a

I’ve looked in the generated source code of these pages and just cannot nail what’s going wrong. It looks like a broken link (i.e. /a instead of </a>) but all links work and there’s no reference to the domain in any of these pages either.

Anyone stumbled across such an error?

Thanks,

2

You wouldn’t need a reference to the domain, just a relative link, the browser adds the domain/path to it automatically.

It isn’t uncommon for search engines to randomly make up page names out of arbitrary strings - they often do this to see whether your site is correctly serving a 404 error for non-existent pages - but it doesn’t sound like that’s what is happening here.

Can you give us the actual domain name where this problem is occurring?

3

Thanks for responding.

I did some investigation work yesterday and ended up disabling the below line in my code:

$bff=preg_replace("/[\\r\
\	]{2,}/", '', $bff);

Today I log into Webmaster Tools and as if magic all the /a link crawl errors have disappeared. Now, providing them don’t reappear it looks like that was the culprit.

Yes, I use relative links, even for the index page so not sure from where Google read and used the domain name as a link.

4

Is that code could be really the reason why you are suffering from an error crawl.

5

Unfortunately not it seems, GA has once again decided to list these errors. Hmmm.