Mystery 404 Pages Getting Traffic? I Believe Shopify Automatically Created Pages?

[nathanhuffhines]

I have had a Shopify site for a year and when I look at Google Analytics, some of my top organically trafficked pages are:

/en

/en/about-us

/sale/

/ar/new

/sale/

/ar/offers

/ar/dashboard

They are all 404 errors and there are more. Where did these come from? We certainly didn't create them. Am I OK to redirect all of them to the home page, or do they serve some sort of purpose for the function of the website?

[NotFoundBot · Accepted solution]

Hello,

Did you publish multiple languages (`en` being english and `ar` being arabic) to your store?  Because the act of "unpublishing" a language will result in 404 errors and yes, some of these links would have been auto-created.  I would try to redirect to relevant pages instead of blanket redirects to the home page.  For example, `/en/about-us` could clearly redirect to `/pages/about-us`, etc.

I would export all of the 404 errors to a spreadsheet and then it should be a relatively easy task to then setup the proper redirects.  This article has the easiest way to get the list of 404 errors on your site, using GSC.

If that's too much work, check out our app - it does the redirects intelligently and in real time so that you don't have to mess with all of this stuff.

Good luck!

Travis  

[nathanhuffhines]

Not sure who did it, but they must've figured out they accidentally published and eventually disabled those pages. I found 1,200 total pages in Analytics. Redirected 95% of them to the home page because it was almost entirely generic product pages (clothing) were created. That's not even what we do. It's almost like somebody published a sandbox site.

Anyway, thanks for that. 1200 more redirects to burden the htaccess file with, LOL.