HTTP 404 for 404-page?
-
Hi Mozzers!
SEOmoz just finished crawling one of my websites and this crawl found 3 errors. One of these errors was the (custom) 404-page, because of the http-status 404.
What's you suggestion about this? Should a 404-page have a status 404?
Thanks in advance for your suggestions!
-
That's one where you do want a 404 returned! That should be fine, and kudos to you for having made a custom page.
-
If it returns a 200 OK code, it can be indexed as a page and may appear in search results, which isn't great since you don't really want to be bringing people in to your 404 page. According to Wikipedia, this is a "Soft 404". Since there is a section under Crawl Errors in Google Webmaster Tools for Soft 404's, I take it that it's better to return a 404 code.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
API for On Page tool
I'm looking for a tool similar to On Page Grader (Moz) or Focus Keyword (Yoast) with API. We are building out or internal CRM system. Even though none of these tools can replace manual on page analysis, it will be used as a metric and to catch human mistakes.
Moz Pro | | OscarSE0 -
Filter Pages
Howdy Moz Forum!! I have a headache of a job over here in the UK and I'd welcome any advice! - It's sunny today, only 1 of 5 days in a year and i'm stuck on this! I have a client that currently has 22,000 pages indexed to Google with almost 4000 showing as duplicate content. The site has a "jobs" and "candidates" list. This can cause all sorts of variations such as job title, language, location etc. The filter pages all seem to be indexed. Plus the static pages are indexed. For example if there were 100 jobs at Moz being advertised, it is displaying the jobs on the following URL structure - /moz
Moz Pro | | Slumberjac
/moz/moz-jobs
/moz/moz-jobs/page/2
/moz/moz-jobs/page/3
/moz/moz-jobs/page/4
/moz/moz-jobs/page/5 ETC ETC Imagine this with some going up to page/250 I have checked GA data and can see that although there are tons of pages indexed this way, non of them past the "/moz/moz-jobs" URL get any sort of organic traffic. So, my first question! - Should I use rel-canonical tags on all the /page/2 & /page/3 etc results and point them all at the /moz/moz-jobs parent page?? The reason for this is these pages have the same title and content and fall very close to "duplicate" content even though it does pull in different jobs... I hope i'm making sense? There is also a lot of pages indexed in a way such as- https://www.examplesite.co.uk/moz-jobs/search/page/9/?candidate_search_type=seo-consulant&candidate_search_language=blank-language These are filter pages... and as far as I'm concerned shouldn't really be indexed? Second question! - Should I "no follow" everything after /page in this instance? To keep things tidy? I don't want all the variations indexed! Any help or general thoughts would be much appreciated! Thanks.0 -
I got an 803 error yesterday on the Moz crawl for most of my pages. The page loads normally in the browser. We are hosted on shopify
I got an 803 error yesterday on the Moz crawl for most of my pages. The page loads normally in the browser. We are hosted on shopify, the url is www.solester.com please help us out
Moz Pro | | vasishta0 -
Pages with Temporary Redirects on pages that don't exist!
Hi There Another obvious question to some I hope. I ran my first report using the Moz crawler and I have a bunch of pages with temporary redirects as a medium level issue showing up. Trouble is the pages don't exist so they are being redirected to my custom 404 page. So for example I have a URL in the report being called up from lord only knows where!: www.domain.com/pdf/home.aspx This doesn't exist, I have only 1 home.aspx page and it's in the root directory! but it is giving a temp redirect to my 404 page as I would expect but that then leads to a MOZ error as outlined. So basically you could randomize any url up and it would give this error so I am trying to work out how I deal with it before Google starts to notice or before a competitor starts to throw all kinds at my site generating these errors. Any steering on this would be much appreciated!
Moz Pro | | Raptor-crew0 -
Domain or Category Links for E-Commerce Page?
I am trying to rank with my page on a major keyword for my E-Commerce store. Currently, I am ranking on page 4 in SERP:
Moz Pro | | soralsokal
mydomain.com/category-for-major-keyword Now when people like to link to me, what should I do? Shall they link to: mydomain.com or mydomain.com/category-for-major-keyword What brings me more in terms of ranking for that keyword with my category? Thanks, Robin1 -
Tracking keyword rankings on sub pages
Hello, What is the best way to track keywords on sub pages of a website through seomoz? Do we need to create a separate campaign for each sub page? Thanks for all the help!
Moz Pro | | DerekDenholm0 -
Duplicate page report
We ran a CSV spreadsheet of our crawl diagnostics related to duplicate URLS' after waiting 5 days with no response to how Rogerbot can be made to filter. My IT lead tells me he thinks the label on the spreadsheet is showing “duplicate URLs”, and that is – literally – what the spreadsheet is showing. It thinks that a database ID number is the only valid part of a URL. To replicate: Just filter the spreadsheet for any number that you see on the page. For example, filtering for 1793 gives us the following result: | URL http://truthbook.com/faq/dsp_viewFAQ.cfm?faqID=1793 http://truthbook.com/index.cfm?linkID=1793 http://truthbook.com/index.cfm?linkID=1793&pf=true http://www.truthbook.com/blogs/dsp_viewBlogEntry.cfm?blogentryID=1793 http://www.truthbook.com/index.cfm?linkID=1793 | There are a couple of problems with the above: 1. It gives the www result, as well as the non-www result. 2. It is seeing the print version as a duplicate (&pf=true) but these are blocked from Google via the noindex header tag. 3. It thinks that different sections of the website with the same ID number the same thing (faq / blogs / pages) In short: this particular report tell us nothing at all. I am trying to get a perspective from someone at SEOMoz to determine if he is reading the result correctly or there is something he is missing? Please help. Jim
Moz Pro | | jimmyzig0 -
Too Many On-Page Links
The SeoMoz site crawler says all my pages have too many links. I am using Dreamweaver with a horizontal Spry drop-down menu bar. My site has several hundred pages and about 100 of them show up in this Spry menu bar. I believe that this would be considered a false positive for too many links - am I right? Or is Google seeing this also as too many links per page? I am trying to get my Google rankings back after being hurt badly by the Penguin. I am using php but don't see another way to do the site links without going to a CMS type site. Thanks for any help you can give.
Moz Pro | | johnsearles0