So today’s Google mystery is I’m getting a bunch of 404 errors that look like this:
some-blog-post/[site_url]
In the above example “some-blog-post” is just sample text I’m including here rather than listing a real post name… the actual errors are in fact my blog post names. But “[site_url]” is not sample text… that’s exactly what shows up in the Google search console site errors list.
So my mystery relates to that [site_url]… is Google telling me that I should assume the name of my site should be within those brackets, so the actual bad URL would be:
some-blog-post/mywebsite.com
Or does the bad URL actually contain the specific text [site_url]?
Another mystery has to do with what is causing these 404 errors. I suspect they are related to an affiliate link cloaking plugin I use.
But for now its that [site_url] thing that confuses me, especially because searching for that term doesn’t really turn up anything. I can set up redirects for the bad URL’s but I don’t know if I should include my site domain URL or the actual text [site_url]!
I’ve never seen this before, and I’m usually on top of what’s happening with my main sites in Analytics and WMT.
All I can suggest is maybe digging in your server error files and see if you can match the data to something. If pages really are unreachable for some reason you should see it there and maybe that will give you more info than Google is.
This is just a guess but if some-blog-post/[site_url] is actually showing up in Google tools then thats the page its picked up by Google. I really dont think its Google adding the [site_url]. This means if I’m guessing right that [site_url] is a config variable either on your WP install or whatever you are using which is being published as a real URL or a link to that URL somewhere which obviously doesnt exist. If you can see the refereing page, then go to that page, view the HTML code and search for [site_url]… maybe that will show something.