Hmm a third of my traffic is error 404

Blog ≫ 2018 ≫ Hmm a third of my traffic is error 404

Mon Jun 4

I mentioned already I was moving websites and would end up ditching a lot of traffic but it's worse than I thought.

I wasn't intending to watch the access logs but Cloudfront gives me some info for free. It looks like 1/3 of my traffic is returning an error 404. This is because I have changed a lot of the paths and not redirected them. This is a big no-no in the world of Google search engine optimisation. However all of the traffic to these pages seems to be spam or other search engines. My most popular page seems to be www.clarkeology.com/a which is the page I used to use for leaving a message on the site. No messages were ever left, apart from by me, so why is it getting thousands of hits? Also the reply links on individual posts are getting similar traffic. It's only dirty spamming robots.

I'm glad I'm not supporting this traffic any more. It's a flat site now, no you can't leave a nonsense message with links to your site in.

Now I have looked at Folkestone Gerald too, 75% of the traffic there is going to an error page. 95% of it is bots though. Well, 95% of it is definitely bots, the other 5% is probably bots. Literally no-one is looking at either of my sites.

I have put some script on the error page so if a real person lands there it will redirect them back to the page they probably wanted.

  (function(location) {
    var m = /m\/(\d+)/.exec(location) // a page that looks like m/666/etc is probably a [blog](/wiki/#blog) post
    var v = /\-(\d+)\//.exec(location) // a page that looks like .*-666/index.html is probably a venue page
    if (m) location.href = '/m/' + m[1]
    else if (v) location.href = '/v/' + v[1]
  })(location)

I should make this a single page static site, that's what I should do...

Blog ≫ 2018 ≫ Hmm a third of my traffic is error 404

⬅️ Busy morning :: Run stats 4/6/18 ➡️