How do I prevent 404's from hurting my site?
-
I manage a real estate broker's site on which the individual MLS listing pages continually create 404 pages as properties are sold. So, on a site with 2200 pages indexed, roughly half are 404s at any given time. What can I do to mitigate any potential harm from this?
-
I support Jane's advice here to make a custom 404 that is as beneficial as possible for the user.
I would only worry about 301 redirecting old property pages to their city/neighborhood subcategory if the page shows up in Google Webmaster Tools 404 section and shows an external link pointing at it that is worth saving. A process you could do about once per month or quarter.
-
Property sites use a range of techniques to handle this - I have seen 404s, 410 Gone responses, 302 redirects and 200 OK responses showing a largely blank page (definitely not recommended) whilst browsing a little this morning.
Others leave the listing live but show that it's no longer on the market, e.g. http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/property-29033160.html
It doesn't sound like you can use this last option, although it would allow you to recycle URLs for properties like rentals that often come back on the market.
If you must go with a 404, try to make it useful as Dave says. Can you customise the 404 page, perhaps pulling in information dynamically based upon the listing that was deleted?
-
I'd create a custom 404 page which runs a similar search, whilst you say you can't avoid the 404 what you can do is make a 404 which is useful to both the user and Google
Also make sure that your site no longer lings to old content.
Run Screaming Frog to check those response codes
-
I should have mentioned that I don't have that option. The pages are dynamically added to the site via a plugin which pulls MLS data from the local real estate listing board. (The plugin is dsIDXpress by Diverse Solutions.)
-
You could setup 301 redirects from the sold property URLs to another relevant page, like other properties available in the same neighborhood/town/city. Or possibly even to search result page that contains very similar properties in regards to square footage, bedrooms, baths, etc.
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
-
What will SEO be like in the 2020's?
Hey guys, I would love to hear your thoughts on how you think SEO will change in the 2020's. The 2010's saw some pretty cool stuff like Panda, Penguin, penalties for non-mobile-friendly, non-secure and slow loading sites. What will be more or less important for SEO's in the 2020's than today? How will machine learning and AI change SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GreenHatWeb0 -
Site structure: Any issues with 404'd parent folders?
Is there any issue with a 404'd parent folder in a URL? There's no links to the parent folder and a parent folder page never existed. For example say I have the following pages w/ content: /famous-dogs/lassie/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dsbud
/famous-dogs/snoopy/
/famous-dogs/scooby-doo/ But I never (and maybe never plan to) created a general **/famous-dogs/ **page. Sitemaps.xml does not link to it, nor does any page on my site. Is there any concerns with doing this? Am I missing out on any sort of value that might pass to a parent folder?0 -
Should I Add Location to ALL of My Client's URLs?
Hi Mozzers, My first Moz post! Yay! I'm excited to join the squad 🙂 My client is a full service entertainment company serving the Washington DC Metro area (DC, MD & VA) and offers a host of services for those wishing to throw events/parties. Think DJs for weddings, cool photo booths, ballroom lighting etc. I'm wondering what the right URL structure should be. I've noticed that some of our competitors do put DC area keywords in their URLs, but with the moves of SERPs to focus a lot more on quality over keyword density, I'm wondering if we should focus on location based keywords in traditional areas on page (e.g. title tags, headers, metas, content etc) instead of having keywords in the URLs alongside the traditional areas I just mentioned. So, on every product related page should we do something like: example.com/weddings/planners-washington-dc-md-va
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pdrama231
example.com/weddings/djs-washington-dc-md-va
example.com/weddings/ballroom-lighting-washington-dc-md-va OR example.com/weddings/planners
example.com/weddings/djs
example.com/weddings/ballroom-lighting In both cases, we'd put the necessary location based keywords in the proper places on-page. If we follow the location-in-URL tactic, we'd use DC area terms in all subsequent product page URLs as well. Essentially, every page outside of the home page would have a location in it. Thoughts? Thank you!!0 -
Can't diagnose this 404 error
Hi Moz community I have started receiving a load of 404 errors that look like this: This page: http://paulminors.com/blog/page/5/ is linking to: http://paulminors.com/category/podcast/paulminors.com which is a broken link. This is happening with a load of other pages as well. It seems that "paulminors.com" is being added to the end of the linking pages URL.I'm using Wordpress and the SEO by Yoast plugin. I have searched for this link in the source of the linking page but can't find it, so I'm struggling to diagnose the problem. Does anyone have any ideas on what could be causing this? Thanks in advance Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao0 -
My New(ish) Site Isn't Ranking Well And Recently Fell
I launched my site (jesfamilylaw.com) at the beginning of January. Since then, I've been trying to build high quality back links. I have a few back links with keyword targeted anchor text from some guest posts I've published (maybe 3 or so) and I have otherwise signed up for business directories and industry-specific directories. I have a few social media profiles and some likes on Facebook, both for the company page and some posts. Despite this, I've had a lot of trouble cracking Google's top ten for any term, long or tall tail. I was starting to climb for Evanston Family Law, which is the key term I believe I am best optimized for, but took a dive yesterday. I fell from maybe the 14th result to somewhere on the 4th page. For all my other target terms, I don't know if I've gotten into the 20s yet. To further complicate matters, my Google Places listing isn't showing and is on the second page of results for Places searches, after businesses that aren't located in the same city. The night before I fell, I resubmitted my site to Google because Webmaster tools was showing duplicate title tags when I had none. I had also made a couple changes to some internal links and title tags, but only for a small fraction of the site. Long story short, I don't know what's going on. I don't know why I fell in the rankings and why my site isn't competitive for some of my target key phrases. I've read so many horror stories about Penguin that I fear my onsite optimization may be hurting my rankings or my back links are insufficient. I've done plenty of competitor research and the sites that are beating me have very aggressive onsite optimization and few back links. In short, I am very confused. Any help would be immensely appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JESFamilyLaw0 -
Can literally any site get 'burned'?
Just curious what people think. The SEOMOZ trust on my site has gone up, all while Google is dropping us in rankings for lots of keywords. Just curious if this can happen to anyone or once you are 100% 'trusted' you're good. We went from 120,000 page views down to about 50,000. All while doubling content, improving the design(at least from a user perspective), and getting more natural links. Seems counter intuitive to Google's mantra of ranking quality. I would guess 'authority' sites never get hit by these updates right? So when you make it you've made it.(at least from a dropping like a rock perspective, obviously you have to keep working). I'm guessing we just need a bunch more quality links but would hate to work on building links, quality content, trust etc for it to be something so finicky long term.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | astahl110 -
A Noob's SEO Plan of attack... can you critique it for me?
I've been digging my teeth into SEO for a solid 1.5 weeks or so now and I've learned a tremendous amount. However, I realize I have only scratched the surface still. One of the hardest things I've struggled with is the sheer amount of information and feeling overwhelmed. I finally think I've found a decent path. Please critique and offer input, it would be much appreciated. Step One: Site Architecture I run an online proofreading & editing service. That being said, there are lots of different segment we would eventually like to rank for other than the catch-all phrases like 'proofreading service'. For example, 'essay editing', 'resume editing', 'book editing', or even 'law school personal statement editing'. I feel that my first step is to understand how my site is built to handle this plan now, and into the future. Right now we simply have the homepage and one segment: kibin.com/essay-editing. Eventually, we will have a services page that serves almost like a site-map, showing all of our different services and linking to them. Step Two: Page Anatomy I know it is important to have a well defined anatomy to these services pages. For example, we've done a decent job with 'above the fold' content, but now understand the importance of putting the same type of care in below the fold. The plan here is to have a section for recent blog posts that pertain to that subject in a section titled "Essay Editing and Essay Writing Tips & Advice", or something to that effect. Also including some social sharing options, other resources, and an 'about us' section to assist with keyword optimization is in the plan. Step Three: Page Optimization Once we're done with Step Two, I feel that we'll finally be ready to truly optimize each of our pages. We've down some of this already, but probably less than 50%. You can see evidence of this on our essay editing page and proofreading rates page. So, the goal here is to find the most relevant keywords for each page and optimize for those to the point we have A grades on our on-page optimization reports. Step Four: Content/Passive Link Building The bones for our content strategy is in place. We have sharing links on blog posts already in place and a slight social media presence already. I admit, the blog needs some tightening up, and we can do a lot more on our social channels. However, I feel we need to start by creating content that our audience is interested in and interacting with them on a consistent basis. I do not feel like I should be chasing link building strategies or guest blog posts at this time. PLEASE correct me if I'm off base here, but only after reading step five: Step Five: Active Link Building My bias is to get some solid months of creating content and building a good social media presence where people are obviously interacting with our posts and sharing our content. My reasoning is that it will make it much easier for me to reach out to bloggers for guest posts as we'll be much more reputable after spending time doing step 4. Is this poor thinking? Should I try to get some guest blog posts in during step 4 instead? Step Six: Test, Measure, Refine I'll admit, I have yet to really dive into learning about the different ways to measure our SEO efforts. Besides being set up with our first campaign as an SEOPro Member and having 100 or so keywords and phrases we're tracking... I'm really not sure what else to do at this point. However, I feel we'll be able to measure the popularity of each blog post by number of comments, shares, new links, etc. once I reach step 6. Is there something vital I'm missing or have forgotten here? I'm sorry for the long winded post, but I'm trying to get my thoughts straight before we start cranking on this plan. Thank you so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TBiz2 -
Why is my site's 'Rich Snippets' information not being displayed in SERPs?
We added hRecipe microformats data to our site in April and then migrated to the Schema.org Recipe format in July, but our content is still not being displayed as Rich Snippets in search engine results. Our pages validate okay in the Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool. Any idea why they are not being displayed in SERP's? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Techboy0