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POjQuery causing 404 errors in Webmaster Tools on /a directory
 

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  1. POjQuery causing 404 errors in Webmaster Tools on /a directory
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    <p>The Googlebot seems to be crawling up inside my jQuery and creating links ending in /a that don't exist and then reporting them as 404 errors.</p> <pre><code>http://www.mySite.com/a </code></pre> <p>The site validates green at the W3C.</p> <p>The "/a" is coming from inside jQuery itself. <em>Edit: The following is a line of code within jQuery v1.5 and 1.5.2 (the only two I looked inside)</em></p> <pre><code>&lt;a href='/a' style='color:red;float:left;opacity:.55;'&gt;a&lt;/a&gt; </code></pre> <p>For now, I'm redirecting it within htaccess before it gets out of hand...</p> <pre><code>Redirect 301 /a http://www.mysite.com </code></pre> <p>Does anyone know why/how the Googlebot would go inside jQuery?</p> <hr> <p><strong>EDIT:</strong></p> <p>I've since blocked the jQuery file with the robots.txt file but I really wasn't expecting the Googlebot to go into external JavaScript files.</p> <hr> <p><strong>EDIT 2:</strong></p> <p>The following is a response from Google employee JohnMu on this issue in <a href="http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?fid=3102f0a5f6e219ac0004a1f75422344b&amp;hl=en" rel="nofollow">the thread I started at Google Groups</a>. Looks like I'm going to do the 301 after all.</p> <blockquote> <p>JohnMu</p> <p>Google Employee</p> <p>4:39 AM</p> <p>Hi guys</p> <p>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). </p> <p>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. </p> <p>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. </p> <p>Cheers</p> <p>John</p> </blockquote>
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    1. COThat doesn't look like jQuery, that looks like an html anchor.
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    2. COAre you creating that link or does jQuery? Something's amiss in here.
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    3. CO@Cory, As reported, that is code within the jQuery file itself. Simply open "jquery-1.5.min.js" and search for that line... it's in there.
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