Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Miss meta description on 404 page
-
Hi,
My 404 page did not have meta description. Is it an error?
Because I run report and seomoz said that a problem.
Thanks!
-
Thanks my friends!
-
Yeah, this page should return a 404 status code as a 404 page, not a 200. Otherwise search bots (like Googlebot and Roger) will think this is a regular page on your site, and as such this page could appear in search results.
-
I redirected ErrorDocument 404 http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/404.shtml
But I am confusing about HTTP status code 200 OK and 404 Not Found. Should I use 200 OK or 404 status for these pages?
-
You would/ should use 301 to fix a 404 error, and direct to the correct content. 404 pages are for when their is no correct content (mistyped url), but ultimately you never want a link to a 404 on your site
its call 404 ERROR for a reason
-
Thanks,
I just edit and add the meta description to 404 page. I hope this is resolution.
I have a custom 404 page and did not use redirect option. What are the difference between 2 ops (redirect 301 vs 404 page customize) in there?
-
Hi John,
You might have numerous pages displaying 404 errors if they are broken links. 301 redirect them all to the right page, then run the report again and see if it is displaying and information on meta descriptions missing.
-
You are talking about a custom 404 page or something else?
obviously, a 404 page is something you need to care for at a different level and either fix the page and url that is giving the 404 to browser or totally remove depending on existing value.
If you are talking about custom 404 page, i think you really need concern yourself with its ranking or anything of the sorts as it is just an error page designed nicely, and in fact it must work as if "page was not found/generic browser 404 error" was displayed.
Here's Google's take at 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
-
I want to move some pages of my website to a folder and nav menu in those pages should only show inner page links, will it hurt SEO?
Hi, My website has a few SaaS products, to make my website simple i want to move my website some pages to its specific folder structure , so eg website.com/product1/features
Technical SEO | | webbeemoz
website.com/product1/pricing
website.com/product1/information and same for product2 and so on, the website.com/product1/.. menu will only show the links of product1 and only one link to homepage (possibly in footer). Please share your opinion will it be a good idea, from UI perspective it will be simple , but i am not sure about SEO perspective, please help thanks1 -
HTML entity characters in meta descriptions
Is it okay to leave HTML entity characters, such as " in meta descriptions? Will search engines translate these appropriately?
Technical SEO | | ellenu0 -
What to do with temporary empty pages?
I have a website listing real estate in different areas that are for sale. In small villages, towns, and areas, sometimes there is nothing for sale and therefore the page is completely empty with no content except a and some footer text. I have thousand of landing pages for different areas. For example "Apartments in Tibro" or "Houses in Ljusdahl" and Moz Pro gives me some warnings for "Duplicate Content" on the empty ones (I think it does so because the pages are so empty that they are quite similar). I guess Google could also think bad of my site if I have hundreds or thousands of empty pages even if my total amount of pages are 100,000. So, what to do with these pages for these small cities, towns and villages where there is not always houses for sale? Should I remove them completely? Should I make a 404 when no houses for sale and a 200 OK when there is? Please note that I have totally 100,000+ pages and this is only about 5% of all my pages.
Technical SEO | | marcuslind900 -
Meta Description VS Rich Snippets
Hello everyone, I have one question: there is a way to tell Google to take the meta description for the search results instead of the rich snippets? I already read some posts here in moz, but no answer was found. In the post was said that if you have keywords in the meta google may take this information instead, but it's not like this as i have keywords in the meta tags. The fact is that, in this way, the descriptions are not compelling at all, as they were intended to be. If it's not worth for ranking, so why google does not allow at least to have it's own website descriptions in their search results? I undestand that spam issues may be an answer, but in this way it penalizes also not spammy websites that may convert more if with a much more compelling description than the snippets. What do you think? and there is any way to fix this problem? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | socialengaged
Eugenio0 -
Backlinks that we have if they are 404?
Hi All, Backlinks that we have if they are 404? Open site explorer shows 1,000 of links and when I check many are 404 and those are spammy links which we had but now the sites are 404 I am doing a link profile check which is cleaning up all spammy links Should i take any action on them? As open site explorer or Google still shows these links on the searches. Should we mention these URL's in disallow in Google webmaster. Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Should I put meta descriptions on pages that are not indexed?
I have multiple pages that I do not want to be indexed (and they are currently not indexed, so that's great). They don't have meta descriptions on them and I'm wondering if it's worth my time to go in and insert them, since they should hypothetically never be shown. Does anyone have any experience with this? Thanks! The reason this is a question is because one member of our team was linking to this page through Facebook to send people to it and noticed random text on the page being pulled in as the description.
Technical SEO | | Viewpoints0 -
SEO plugin by Yoast messing up my title/meta description
Hey guys, I'm having some issues with my wordpress blog, and I believe SEO plugin by Yoast could be the one causing it. I have set a title for my wordpress blog, and a tagline. This was set in dashboard > settings > general Under "titles and metas" > home in the plugin it says, title: %%sitename%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitedesc%%, and meta description is blank. The reports on seomoz says my title is title+meta description - making it to long (to many characters). What could be the issue here? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | danielpett0