301 on ALL 404 for Pagerank Recovery, bad idea?
-
Its a bad idea to do a 301 to the home page of the site on all 404 pages as a way of pagerank recovery? If so, why? Thanks,
-
Thanks! I would like to 301 to this page http://bligoo.com/explore let me know what you think
-
it depends one what sort of 404, if its a 404 because its in the index, then i would let them 404 and fade away, if its a 404 because it is a external link then i would 301 to a relevant page, if they ae internal links, then i would correc the link, as not to leak link juice using a 301
-
Ignored but not penaliced? I dont worry if it is ignored, I think there is more value on the home page for a visitor than a 404 page. I think google use the same criteria, no? Thanks for your answer!
-
We provide a free blogging and social network creation platform www.bligoo.com (think at this as a mix of Wordpress and Ning) Over time, some users remove their sites, leaving the incoming links. We are looking for a way to preserve this page rank. May be linking to a search page , maybe just to the front page, or may be is just a bad idea and can be penalice and we should loose this...
-
They will be ignored if you do this.
For large redirect projects, you’ll need to get dirty and redirect all that
you want to keep the value from. There’s no simple way around this. Skip mass
redirects to a single page, as most won’t end up passing value, and remember:
_keep all redirects pointed to pages which are relevant to the original. _
Skipping this step negates the value.
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/10/06/managing-redirects-301s-302s-and-canonicals.aspx -
I would make all internal pages which are 404 errors, turn them to 301s to relevant pages on the working site.
I need to see an example of this home pages with this relevant index page you desire to 301 it too.
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
-
Any idea why pages are not being indexed?
Hi Everyone, One section on our website is not being indexed. The product pages are, but not some of the subcategories. These are very old pages, so thought it was strange. Here is an example one one: https://www.moregems.com/loose-cut-gemstones/prasiolite-loose-gemstones.html If you take a chunk of text, it is not found in Google. No issues in Bing/Yahoo, only Google. You think it takes a submission to Search Console? Jeff
Technical SEO | | vetofunk1 -
Self Referencing Links - Good or Bad?
As an agency we get quite a few of our clients come to us saying "Ooo, this company just contacted me saying they've run an SEO report on my site and we need to improve on these following things" We had one come through the other day that had reported on something we had not seen in any others before. They called them self-referencing links and marked it as a point of action should be taken. They had stated that 100% of the pages on our clients website had self-referencing links. The definition of self-referencing is when there is a link on a page that is linking to the page you are currently on. So for example you're on the home page and there is a link in the nav bar at the top that says "Home" with a link to the home page, the page you are already currently on. Is it bad practice? And if so can we do anything about it as it would seem strange from a UI point of view not to have a consistent navigation. I have not heard anything about this before but I wanted to get confirmation before going back to our client and explaining. Thanks Mozzers!
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
How long for a sitewide 301 to reindex?
Hey Gang, Finally joined the big boys here, excited to see what we all can do together. Here is my situation. I have been struggling since panda 1.0 on a particular site at www.burnworld.com. Over 2011 we figured out what the issues were with the content and went on a major cleanup. This seemed to help towards the end of the 2011. However further panda updates this year mainly April have again struck. This was after adding a wordpress blog to the site late 2011, so it was a mix of a traditional html site and a wordpress blog. Thinking that this could be an issue in May this year we transferred all the content over to wordpress only. We did keep the same linking strucutre using a permallink plugin to set specific url's. Forward to Panda 20. This wiped out all rankings and then we could not even rank for our own content. One site that syndicates our content is now ranking for our content instead of us, and many 'feed' sites that scrape out feeds also rank insead of us. Okay now to my original question. 2 weeks ago we pulled the plug and made the decision it may be best to start over on www.burnworld.net since the .net in the past was a blog on wordpress (which was shutdown earlier n 2012), but sat with about 5 pages of content until we did the 301. So today none of the pages are in the main index and I am wondering if doing the 301 might have been a mistake by pointing it to an existing site that never really ranked. Would it have been best to start on a new domain? How long have others seen before google puts the pages back in the main index? Would like to figure out the best action to take to get back into google's good graces. I'll keep this page updated so others with this issue can hopefully have a resource to turn to. BTW- nothing has chaned with Binghoo, rankings are all the same and they have updated the domain change properly.
Technical SEO | | robdawg0 -
Client with Very Very Bad Onsite SEO
So one of my clients has a really really bad website from the technical perspective. I am talking over 75k in violations and warnings. Granted, the tagging is done well but any other SEO violation you can think of is occurring. In any case, they are building a new website, and I am on a retainer for a couple hours a week to do some link building. I am feeling like I am not getting anywhere. What is your advice? Should I keep on keeping on or advice the client to put SEO on hold until the technical issues are resolved. I feel like all of this link building isn't having the value that it could have with a site like this.
Technical SEO | | runnerkik0 -
260k 301 redirects
Hello, I just found that some of the urls on my site have both ugly characters and some other things I'd like to fix (such as ---- into a single - ) After some local tests i've seen that If i leave some imperfections there will be 48k different urls on the other hand if the renaming procedure is strict i'll have around 260k out of 2.3M urls to be renamed. If I'm going to do this I'll create new canonicals meta tag and redirect old urls with 301 headers to the new location. The content will not change. My big doubt is SEO wise, I know that I'll have better urls, but aren't those too much redirects on a single day? what would you do if you wish to have shipshape urls and know some of these are crap? thanks
Technical SEO | | mylittlepwny0 -
301 or a 404
Just had a discussion with a collegue about a page on our own website. We have some cases which are outdated. These pages receive some visitors but they arrive there when they search for the clients brand name, so for us they are irelevant. What's the best way to handle these kind of pages? Is a 301-redirect to the showcase overview the way to go or do we make it a 404 and include the showcase overview in this 404?
Technical SEO | | nvs.nim0 -
404 errors and what to do
Hi, I am fairly new to the whole seo thing and am still getting confused a bit as to what to do to sort things out. I've checked the help pages but I cannot seem to find the issue. I've just signed up so my site is crawled for the first time and coming up with more then a 1000 404 errors. I checked a couple of the links via the report I downloaded and it does indeed show a 404 error but when I check the pages all seems to work fine. I did find one issue where an image if clicked on twice was pointing to an url with 'title= at the end. Now I have tried to get of that but couldn't find anything wrong. I'm a bit lost as to where to start!
Technical SEO | | junglefrog0 -
301 Redirect Issue
I'm having an issue with 301 redirects: Let's see if I can verbalize my thoughts on this one... So we just recently moved our site to Wordpress. One of our new 301 commands is redirecting oursite.com/news to oursite.com/blog . However there are other links from our previous site that look like oursite.com/news/XYZ and the issue is that, because wordpress structures its links differently, that URL is not equivalent to oursite.com/blog/XYZ. Instead, it might look something more like oursite.com/blog/yaddayadda/XYZ or something. Does that make sense? The issue is that when I find an old link of ours on google that looks something like "oursite.com/news/XYZ" or "oursite.com/news/ABC" it is automatically replacing "news" with "blog". When I try to go in manually and redirect anything that says "/news/XYZ" to "/blog/yaddayadda/XYZ" it still doesn't work. It still just replaces "news" with "blog." Wow I realize that might not make sense to anyone but if it does - please advise!! Thanks!!!!
Technical SEO | | EntrustSEO0