Pages not found

Overview

When a visitor follows a link to a page that has moved or been deleted, they see a "Page not found" error. The Pages not found report under SEO → Reports lists those addresses, so you can fix the link that sends people there or add a redirect to the page that replaced it.

Reading the report

1. In the WordPress admin, go to SEO → Reports and open Pages not found. The number beside it is how many addresses were hit in the last 30 days.
2. Each row shows the Address visitors asked for, how many Hits it had, when it was Last seen, and From: the page the visitor came from, when their browser said. An address on your own site means one of your pages links to it.
3. Suggested redirect shows the page the address most likely meant, when Dirigible SEO can tell (see below). Create redirect adds it. Edit first opens it in SEO → Redirects to change before saving, and Add redirect opens an empty one there for addresses with no suggestion.
4. View opens the address so you can see the error yourself.

The report lists its 50 busiest addresses; select Show all at the bottom for the rest, up to 500.

Fixing an address

WordPress redirects an address that's missing only its folder (for example /our-team/ when the page is at /about/our-team/) to the page with exactly that name, and an old address to a page whose address you changed. Dirigible SEO doesn't let it guess beyond that: an address such as /events/ no longer sends visitors to an unrelated page whose address merely starts with "events", so it's listed here as not found and you can choose where it should go.

• If the page still exists under a new address, add a redirect from the old address to the new one. A redirect sends visitors (and search engines) straight to the right page. See Redirects.
• If the link is on your own site (the From column shows your site), edit that page and fix the link.
• If the page is gone for good and nothing replaces it, a "not found" error is the right answer. Leave it, or redirect it as Gone (410) to tell search engines it was removed on purpose.

Suggested redirects

For each address, Dirigible SEO looks for the page it most likely meant:

• Strong match: a post that used to have this address before its address was changed, or a page with exactly this name (the last part of the address) that now lives somewhere else, such as under a different parent page.
• Likely match: a category or tag with this name, or one of several pages that share it.
• Possible match: a post or page with a very similar name, such as /our-teams/ for /our-team/. Check these before you create them.

Nothing is redirected until you select Create redirect, which adds a permanent (301) redirect. Once an address is redirected, the column says where it goes; the row stays in the report until the old hits age out.

Where the hits come from

Dirigible SEO keeps its own small record: each missing address, how many times a day it was hit, and the latest page that linked to it, for 30 days. It never records who the visitor was. It keeps this whether or not the Redirection plugin is active, and doesn't read Redirection's own 404 log.

Redirects you create here are Dirigible SEO's own. To move Redirection's redirects over, see Redirects, under Moving from Redirection.

Tips

• The error page's title (the browser tab, and what screen readers announce first) reads "Page not found" and your site name, with your SEO separator between them, and it has no description.
• Hits count every visit: the hosting cache doesn't keep "not found" pages, so each one reaches the site. Bots are left out.
• On a multisite network the log and the plugin's other data belong to each site; deleting the plugin removes them site by site.
• Requests from search engine crawlers, site monitors and scanners aren't listed, nor are missing images, scripts and the like, nor anything you hit while signed in. Only addresses a visitor could reach from a link are kept.
• Check again at the top of the Reports tab refreshes this report along with the others.