Recurring 400 errors can significantly diminish the organic search traffic your website receives and waste potential referral traffic and link equity from other websites.
Error 400 typically occurs when your file size exceeds the limit set by a website server. Luckily, there are various solutions to rectify this situation.
Malformed URLs
Malformed links on your website may prevent search engine crawlers from reaching critical pages and negatively affect its performance. Typographical errors often contribute to malformed URLs; running a site review and correcting any identified errors should help remedy this situation.
Malformed URLs often occur when servers or proxy cannot recognize them correctly, usually when missing components are missing from or using an inappropriate protocol. To address this, ensure your URL contains all required components – type of protocol (HTTP or HTTPS), port number and query parameters.
Malformed URLs may also result from improper redirections and missing canonical tags, which can have a devastating impact on website performance and lead to 404 error pages when clicked upon. To address this, use Sitechecker as a way of finding any broken links and fixing them individually.
Hackers have recently employed a novel tactic to bypass detection and deliver convincing-looking phishing emails. Researchers from GreatHorn have observed an extraordinary 6,000 percent surge in attacks that use URL prefixes with flip backslashes in an effort to disguise malicious code within. This technique involves replacing two forward slashes with backslashes in the prefix, making it harder for scanners to identify links as potentially malicious.
Malformed links not only compromise search engine visibility but they can also have an adverse impact on user experience. They may take users to error pages that do not pertain to their intended destination and could create an unpleasant user experience if that page provides nothing informative or helpful for their journey.
A successful way to address malformed URLs is ensuring they are formatted properly, using tools such as Sitechecker to check for broken links and remove errors or typos. You could also contact any website owners responsible and request that they update any incorrect links accordingly.
Bad Request
When a website server receives a request it cannot fulfil, the 400 Bad Request status code will appear. This error typically appears due to temporary glitches like typos in URLs, corrupted browser cookies or conflicts between extensions; alternatively, it could also be caused by uploading too large of a file and surpassing its upload limit on the server.
Troubleshooting a 400 Bad Request requires inspecting the syntax of its URL, including domain name, directory path and query string of a website. Furthermore, look out for any illegal or irrelevant characters such as “%”, which often cause error messages; in such instances resize your file accordingly before uploading again.
Another common source of error messages can be corrupted website files, including JavaScript, HTML and CSS code files. If this seems to be your issue, try opening it in Incognito mode (private window mode) so as to clear away cache and cookies stored by your browser.
If the 400 Bad Request error persists, try rebooting or resetting your router. This may help clear any stored RAM, flush temporary caches, and close any running programs. In addition, connect to another network to see if your Internet connectivity could be contributing to the issue.
An alternative way is to utilize a proxy server in order to bypass your firewall, enabling you to test browser compatibility without impacting other network functions. If the issue still remains, consider reaching out to your web hosting provider who should be able to offer more insight and suggestions for solving it. In some instances, poor DNS cache configuration may trigger 400 Bad Request errors – should this persist, reset browser cache and cookies regularly so as to stop further incidents of these errors from recurring.
Internet Connection
When visiting a website, your browser sends a request to its server for data about it. If this request is incorrect or missing anything essential, an error will occur and an error message will appear on screen. Client-side issues typically refers to issues associated with browser or device issues and there may be several things you can try in order to remedy these problems.
First, check that your internet is working as it should with online tools that measure speed and latency. If the problem continues, contact your ISP to see if there are any local issues preventing connectivity in your area.
Clear your browser cache – This may also help when trying to access pages which are currently not available on the server, and thus giving rise to an Error 400 message.
One more step you should take to optimize your experience on any particular website is disabling browser extensions that might be impacting it. These extensions may have an adverse impact on cookies that make up the website and cause error 400 messages to appear; you can narrow down which extension is responsible by disabling one by one until you identify which one caused the problem.
If the 400 error persists after applying these fixes, try switching browsers and see if that helps identify whether it’s due to something within your control or is related to something out of your hands.
Last but not least, reboot your computer. Although often disregarded, restarting can often help solve various issues on its own. Also try rebooting any connected devices (e.g. your router) that could possibly be interfering. If that doesn’t help, contact an IT department or professional for further troubleshooting assistance – best of luck!
Server Error
Error messages on a server running a website indicate something has gone awry with it, often signalling an attempt at Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks by flooding it with traffic in hopes it will cause it to go offline and crash.
When a server error arises, usually nothing can be done from the client side (ie: your browser or computer) to resolve it – instead you should contact the website’s webmaster directly for resolution.
There are various types of server errors, including:
Error 400 Bad Request
When uploading files that exceed their maximum upload size limit, this error occurs. One method to remedy it would be compressing them down further to decrease their size; but do note that compression could compromise quality of content.
403 Forbidden This error code indicates that you’ve attempted to access content or features not permitted on the server, potentially an indicator of hacking attempts; so it is critical that all security settings remain up-to-date.
409 Conflict
When versioning is used and the PUT request contains changes that conflict with those made in an earlier request by third parties, this status code will be returned. The response entity SHOULD include a list of differences according to its Content-Type setting.
This server-oriented error, similar to 403 Forbidden, occurs when an owner decides to make resources permanently inaccessible – often for limited-time promotions or to remove resources belonging to people no longer working at a website.
Getting an HTTP 400 error on websites requiring user authentication? Try clearing away outdated cookies and cache. While this should usually do the trick, be mindful that doing so could also log you off several websites and reset personal settings. If this doesn’t help, disabling any extensions installed on your browser might free up memory and speed loading times up; failing that, reboot both your computer and internet connection in order to clear space in Random Access Memory (RAM), as this should resolve it.