301 redirect all 404 pages
-
Hi I would like to have a second opinion on this. I am working on an ecommerce website that they 301 redirect all 404 pages (including the URLs entered incorrectly) to the “All categories page”. Will this have any negative SEO impact?
-
Yes - indeed. The 301 need to be relevant. You can not redirect www.domain.com/red-pantss to www.domain.com/blue-sweaters
/red-pantss --> /pants or even better /red-pants
-
If people are only occasionally typing in "/troussers" instead of "/trousers" then let it 404. Its there to let people know "I'm sorry, this isn't here. Perhaps you misspelled something." You could always 301 it if you really felt like it because it wouldn't hurt anything in the long run.
Now, if you found that you're sending 500 people a day to a 404 page for "/troussers" when they're looking for "/trousers" and you find there are relevant inlinks pointing at the wrong page then by all means go and 301 those people to the correct page. They'll be better served by it. But if you're redirecting all of those people to "All Categories" then you aren't being thoughtful of the customer's needs.
Indiscriminately 301ing everyone to "All Categories" without considering what their intentions are is not helping that customer and will likely wind up with an ever increasing bounce rate on "All Categories".
-
"My main concern here is 301 redirecting mistyped/ incorrectly entered URL s to the “All categories” page rather than returning a custom 404 page. Will this be problematic for SEO???"
Yes that is bad for SEO do not do that - non existent pages need to 404 and not 301. Even some pages that used to exist might make sense to 404 if they have no links pointing to them and no relevant new category section to 301 them to.
-
So you mean a customer types in /troussers and you would like to redirect that request to /trousers ?
That will no be a problem to SEO, hence google does not know the /troussers-page.
You can not get in SEO-trouble for redirecting pages that are not indexed.
I would say that if you get a lot of 404's because the customer mistyped your url - and it is not traffic from an other page/domain where there is a mistyped link - there is no problem!
-
Thanks for all your responses :). My main concern here is 301 redirecting mistyped/ incorrectly entered URL s to the “All categories” page rather than returning a custom 404 page. Will this be problematic for SEO???
-
Customer: Can i buy a pair of red trousers?
404: Sorry. We dont have any.
301: Sorry. We dont have any red trousers. But maybe these blue trousers would look great on you?
What you are doing is interrupting your customer. Consider that the way the customer enters your store, has a purpose. If the customer used the link www.store.com/trousers - they expect trousers on the page:
Customer: Can i ...
301: Welcome customer. Take a look around and see if you can find what you're looking for.
- you should definitely be more specific. 301 requests to pages regarding trousers to your trousers-category, and 301 redirects request to pages regarding boots to your boots category.
-
It shouldn't but I'd consider a more specific approach.
Would it be possible to redirect URLs to more specific (and appropriate) landing pages? It might limit any interruption to the user journey.
Also, how many URLs are we talking about here? If we're talking hundreds of thousands (seen it happen with some CMS), redirecting them all via .htaccess might slow down the speed of your site, slightly. Google does take site speed into account for SEO, so be wary of this - although this will only be a problem if you're redirecting an absolute truckload of URLs.
Other than that, it's generally good practice to 301 404s, so I'd go ahead with it.
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
-
301 Redirects, Sitemaps and Indexing - How to hide redirected urls from search engines?
We have several pages in our site like this one, http://www.spectralink.com/solutions, which redirect to deeper page, http://www.spectralink.com/solutions/work-smarter-not-harder. Both urls are listed in the sitemap and both pages are being indexed. Should we remove those redirecting pages from the site map? Should we prevent the redirecting url from being indexed? If so, what's the best way to do that?
Technical SEO | | HeroDesignStudio0 -
301 Redirect - Technical Question
I have recently updated a site and for the url's that had changed or were not transferring I set up 301 redirects in the htaccess file as follows This one works - Redirect 301 /industry-sectors http://www.tornadowire.co.uk/fencing But this one doesn't - Redirect 301 /industry-sectors/equine http://www.tornadowire.co.uk/fencing/application/equestrian/ What it does is change the url to this instead http://www.tornadowire.co.uk/fencing/equine ..... which returns a 404 page not found error The server is nginx based server and we have moved from a joomal platform to a wordpress platform I would be grateful for any ideas
Technical SEO | | paulie650 -
301 redirect after penalty to domain which currently 301 to the penalised domain
Hello all, As I have mentioned in another Q&A, one of our new clients got hit by manual penalty. I checked their link profile and there was a lot of black hat involved. Long story sort, I submitted a reconsiderationr equest which was not enough as it seems 99,9% of his links are bad links. We took the decision to move a newly launched web site from www.websitename.com to www.website-name.com with the latter being an old domain name with good authority and clean link profile. The problem is that at the moment the www.website-name.com is set to 301 redirect to www.websitename.com and what we want to do now is take the web site off www.websitename.com and launch (not 301 as we dont want to pass the penalty to the clean domain) it to www.website-name.com. What is the best practise for this particular case and are there any things i should pay attention to? I would appreciate your advise!
Technical SEO | | artdivision0 -
404 errors is webmaster - should I 301 all pages?
Currently working on a retail site that shows over 1200 404 errors coming from urls that are from products that were on the site, but have now been removed as they are seasonal/out of stock. What is the best way of dealing with this situation ongoing? I am aware of the fact that these 404s are being marked as url errors in Google Webmaster. Should I redirect these 404s to a more appropriate live page or should I leave them as they are and not redirect them? I am concerned that Google may give the site a penalty as these 404s are growing (as the site is a online retail store and has products removed from its page results regularly). I thought Google was able to recognise 404s and after a set period of time would push them out of the error report. Also is there a tool out there that on mass I can run all the 404s urls through to see their individual page strength and the number of links that point at each one? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Oxfordcomma0 -
How to avoid 404 errors when taking a page off?
So... We are running a blog that was supposed to have great content. Working at SEO for a while, I discovered that is too much keyword stuffing and some SEO shits for wordpress, that was supposed to rank better. In fact. That worked, but I'm not getting the risk of getting slaped by the Google puppy-panda. So we decided to restard our blog from zero and make a better try. So. Every page was already ranking in Google. SEOMoz didn't make the crawl yet, but I'm really sure that the crawlers would say that there is a lot of 404 errors. My question is: can I avoid these errors with some tool in Google Webmasters in sitemaps, or shoud I make some rel=canonicals or 301 redirects. Does Google penalyses me for that? It's kinda obvious for me that the answer is YES. Please, help 😉
Technical SEO | | ivan.precisodisso0 -
301 redirect from root to /index.aspx
I have taken over the SEO for www.domain.net. The way i've inherited the setup is that www.domain.net is 301 redirected to www.domain.net/index.aspx Looking at top pages and linking root domains in Opensiteexplorer I can see that www.domain.net/index.aspx has 1,006 linking root domains www.domain.net has 806 linking root domains. I assume that www.domain.net is passing the value of it's 806 domain links to www.domain.net/index.aspx via the 301 redirect and because of this would expect www.domain.net/index.aspx to be the strongest page on the site and be the url that ranks in the listings for many relevant searches. It appears however that www.domain.net is what is shown in listings and not www.domain.net/index.aspx ?? Can anyone explain why this might be?? If I do a site: search in Google then www.domain.net is indexed and not www.domain.net/index.aspx ??
Technical SEO | | QubaSEO0 -
Not sure which URL to use for 301 redirect
A client has new website design completed by another developer, was launched in April of this year. No 301 redirect was set up so duplicate content is an issue. Client has had a website with same domain name for about 10 years, but has not had any SEO work completed before or since his new site design. For non-www there are 6 referring links - 1 considered to have authority, for www there are also 6 but 3 considered to have authority. More links seem to coming from www than non-www. But for one of the clients keywords they are ranked #1 for their area and that links to their non-www address. And even though no redirects set up by developer, non-www has had far more visits according to Google Analytics. So many basics that still need to be done for site: no meta-descriptions on any page, H1 and page titles could use keywords, call to action moved above fold, etc. Considering this is a new site, and new SEO work and many more inbound links needed, does it matter which address I redirect to? _Cindy Barnard
Technical SEO | | CeCeBar0 -
Do 301 redirects pass page rank quickly
Hi I have been asked to carry out a site audit for a potential client. The site has that many issues I don't where to start in explaining them however, there is one question we are debating and would like to get a second opinion on it. The site I am auditing used to have a homepage rank 7. The site has currently had a redesign (new template with new URLs) and now the root domain 301 redirects to a sub folder two levels deep (not ideal I know!). This happened about a month ago and we are still getting N/A for toolbar page rank. The question is, does Google page rank transfer quicker than normal due to the redirects? or do we still have to wait on the next Google Page Rank update? Thanks in advance Gavelect
Technical SEO | | Equatorites0