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I have noticed when working with various Kohana sites that webmaster tools almost always flags up /a as 404'ing. I have no specific code to show you because it occurs in pretty much all of them.

I just wondered if anyone else had or has fixed this problem. Is it a known issue?

Thanks.

Sparky
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Olical
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  • Google knows about it and it's caused by jQuery. See this [thread](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5749348/jquery-causing-404-errors-in-webmaster-tools-on-a-directory) and this [thread](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5416081/404-errors-on-a-folders-in-webmaster-tools) to read Google's response. – Sparky Apr 28 '11 at 16:37
  • Issue has nothing to do with php or kohana, perhaps those tags should be removed. – Sparky Apr 28 '11 at 16:38
  • Hey, i just noticed this behaviour for some of my websites, running on different hosts and cms, among them wordpress. Couldn't find the links on there, though... maybe it's just a Webmaster Tools Bug? Or did you come to any solution? – Jan Papenbrock Mar 31 '11 at 08:02
  • I think redirecting them with a 301 did the trick but I can't be sure. Because I have moved to a static site. Since I have then it has stopped so it is either down to the 301 or Kohana. – Olical Mar 31 '11 at 08:13
  • for me this was caused by jQuery. See my answer above. – Sparky Apr 21 '11 at 19:56

2 Answers2

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jQuery is the root source of the code being picked up by the Googlebot. Within the jQuery file itself is this line...

<a href='/a' style='color:red;float:left;opacity:.55;'>a</a>

As per Google (see below), add a 301 redirect to the htaccess file to kill this problem for good.

Redirect 301  /a  http://www.mySite.com

The following is a response from Google employee JohnMu on this issue in the thread I started at Google Groups.

JohnMu

Google Employee

4:39 AM

Hi guys

Just a short note on this -- yes, we are picking up the "/a" link for many sites from jQuery JavaScript. However, that generally isn't a problem, if we see "/a" as being a 404, then that's fine for us. As with other 404-URLs, we'll list it as a crawl error in Webmaster Tools, but again, that's not going to be a problem for crawling, indexing, or ranking. If you want to make sure that it doesn't trigger a crawl error in Webmaster Tools, then I would recommend just 301 redirecting that URL to your homepage (disallowing the URL will also bring it up as a crawl error - it will be listed as a URL disallowed by robots.txt).

I would also recommend not explicitly disallowing crawling of the jQuery file. While we generally wouldn't index it on its own, we may need to access it to generate good Instant Previews for your site.

So to sum it up: If you're seeing "/a" in the crawl errors in Webmaster Tools, you can just leave it like that, it won't cause any problems. If you want to have it removed there, you can do a 301 redirect to your homepage.

Cheers

John

See this SO answer for even more information:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/6587142/594235

Community
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Sparky
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Please provide some more information.

Is /a a valid location in your website? Of course it's going to flag /a if it doesn't exist.

The Pixel Developer
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  • No, it says it is linked to from every page, in multiple web sites that never link to /a. /a does not exist and is not linked to by any page. Maybe it is a problem with web master tools? – Olical Feb 14 '11 at 16:09
  • Hmm, that's very strange. Have you tried viewing the page as Google bot? You can find the option in the webmaster tools. A possibility is some malware has infected your website and is only displaying itself to Google. – The Pixel Developer Feb 14 '11 at 16:32
  • I doubt it can be malware, unless the same one has infected multiple completely unrelated servers and websites. I have seen it on pretty much every Kohana base site. – Olical Feb 15 '11 at 13:01
  • This `href="/a"` definitely coming from jQuery as confirmed by looking at [the jQuery source code](http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.9.1.js). This has also been [confirmed as a known issue by a Google employee](http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?fid=3102f0a5f6e219ac0004a1f75422344b&hl=en). – Sparky Mar 08 '13 at 18:41