Why do I have 404 pages in my AwStats?

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RobertR
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Inmotion started hosting our website recently, n-news.com and we have been happy.

I was looking at some of the Logs in the cPanelX and noticed a LOT of th ip addresses have a status of !404 - why? It doesn't seem like there are broken links on the website. I don't know enough to really tell where these visitors are going, but it LOOKS like they are getting sent to the broken link page. Why? Maybe I am just reading this cPanel info incorrectly.
Thanks - Rob
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jamesr
Thank you for your question Rob! I checked your cPanel error log and I see no 404 errors in there. In your AwStats there are many references to "images/search.png" in the "input id="s"" CSS code that is not on your server. There are a few old HTML pages of yours getting hit by search engines still. All the other 404 errors are bots, crawlers, and other visitors that are going to a page that is invalid. This happens when a SpamBot or other crawler trys to find a page using some algorithm. You can redirect old pages to new pages to eliminate those 404 errors. You can try resubmitting your website to the search engines to get your old URL's removed from their database. You can submit to Google to do this. You can also restrict your robots from crawling your site. Not all robots are wanted so you can block IP addresses or set up your robots.txt file to restrict bots. Best regards, James R