A few days ago, Google’s crawl turned up dozens of 404 errors for one of my Bubble sites. I took a look in the Webmaster Tools and all the “pages” look like internal directory files. Any idea why these would turn up like this all of the sudden? I certainly haven’t done anything to expose those files/pages (nor would I know how). To be clear, these aren’t pages I’ve created in the app - they look like internal stuff.
I reached out to support about this and they said it’s not Bubble, so wondering if anyone might have some insight.
They all say they’re linked directly from the index page. I now have over 100 more errors that popped up the next day. But none of this is anything I’m doing. I wonder if something internal got exposed and is now able to be crawled?
The plugins I have installed have been there for a while, so I’m not sure if it’s any of those. I also don’t have any custom scripts anywhere.
Here’s another screenshot of different URLs in case it helps anyone…
If you go to the index page of your app (using Google Chrome), right click on Inspect > More Tools > Search
Then search one of the URL paths from your list, and that should maybe give you an idea where those 404s links are on your index page / within a plugin, etc…
It’s worth a shot, but it may be a needle in a haystack.
@NigelG I didn’t. I tried @cowontherun’s link and nothing turned up. After seeing your message, I went back to look and it looks like it at least stopped finding new errors. I have about 180 or so from Jan 7 and Jan 8.
Does anyone have any updates on this? We just got a similar message a few days ago from Google and are seeing 176 new URLs that have 404s – way too many for it to be someone linking to a few nonexistent pages on our site. Bubble Support says it has nothing to do with Bubble so hoping someone else has some insights.
The names of the URL’s make it seem like they’re for a plugin or something similar. Here’s a screenshot in case the details are helpful to anyone.
Clearly, we don’t want The Google thinking our site has hundreds of 404 errors so any help would be greatly appreciated.
The last time I posted here was the last time I saw any new 404s. I still have no idea what caused it and what stopped it… I deploy the site probably 2-3x/week.
All of the URLS are coming from configuration files from Bubble and are not URLs of my actual website. It looks like this is not a super urgent issue based on the above blurb since the URLs don’t exist at all on the site. There must have been some leakage from Bubble that is causing all of the sudden these configuration files to be fetched by Google.
I received the same on my site a few days ago. Any updates on whether you managed to fix them or just ignored these errors as they aren’t valid pages? @sridharan.s@romanmg@jonathan.timianko
Same thing happend to me, but I just added those URLs to the robots.txt to be blocked and marked the errors as resolved in Webmaster tools, that does the trick.
Just ignoring like @romanmg said because I didn’t know how to handle it also, and I figured if it was a really serious issue the Bubble team would have patched something by now. Obviously everyone wants no errors ever and everything clean all the time but I guess this is just one of those things you disregard.
@gxjansen, I haven’t messed with a robots.txt file and prefer not to start for as long as I have to, so is there any technical benefit aside from not seeing no 404 errors in the google search console in adjusting the robots.txt file?
Thanks for the inputs! I haven’t seen any drop in search rankings yet, but will keep an eye out for the next couple of weeks. Hopefully the errors will resolve after some time as they are not really valid pages.
well, google would no longer crawl those pages so you’ll have more crawl budget left for other pages that you do want to have indexed. And I don’t know if your 404 error rate is a ranking factor, if it is than it’s probably good not to have many of them
In general it’s quite useful to “mess” with the robots.txt file to be able to give guidance to search engines on what and how they should crawl your website, nothing wrong with it (although indeed you need to know what you’re doing so you won’t block your whole website).
You can also just copy mine with all the lines disallowing the weird unknown pages mentioned above that don’t seem to be bubble but do appear as errors in webmaster tools:
Everything turns up with “No matches found”
