What to do about old urls that don't logically 301 redirect to current site?
-
Mozzers,
I have changed my site url structure several times.
As a result, I now have a lot of old URLs that don't really logically redirect to anything in the current site.
I started out 404-ing them, but it seemed like Google was penalizing my crawl rate AND it wasn't removing them from the index after being crawled several times. There are way too many (>100k) to use the URL removal tool even at a directory level.
So instead I took some advice and changed them to 200, but with a "noindex" meta tag and set them to not render any content. I get less errors but I now have a lot of pages that do this.
Should I (a) just 404 them and wait for Google to remove (b) keep the 200, noindex or (c) are there other things I can do? 410 maybe?
Thanks!
-
"So instead I took some advice and changed them to 200, but with a "noindex" meta tag and set them to not render any content. I get less errors but I now have a lot of pages that do this."
I would not recommend keeping it that way. You could mass redirect them to the sitemap page if they are passing PR and or some traffic, and there is no logical other place to point them.
404's are not really something that can hurt you, providing that they are coming from external sources and you aren't providing 404 links on your site to dead pages on your site, if there are these, then you should fix the internal links at the source.
-
I dont think 404 errors hurt your site. If you have that many pages, they are most likely crawling your site a lot anyway. Have you set your crawl frequency in your sitemap? On bigger sites that get frequent updates, we set the crawl frequency to daily rather than weekly.
If possible, try to see if there are any top level items you can submit a URL removal request for. Hopefully this can speed up the process fo getting the URL's removed. This process can take a long time for Google to take care of. After changing websites we still had 404 errors after 6 months, even after submitting the URL removal request.
Another option is to have the page render a 410 rather than a 404. A 410 states to the search engine the page is gone, and will not be coming back. If you are using some form of cart system or cms there might be a way to apply the code to a large number of pages at once, rather than trying to manually code 100k pages.
"410 Gone
The requested resource is no longer available at the server and no forwarding address is known. This condition is expected to be considered permanent. Clients with link editing capabilities SHOULD delete references to the Request-URI after user approval. If the server does not know–or has no facility to determine–whether or not the condition is permanent, the status code 404 (Not Found) should be used instead of 410 (Gone). This response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise."Worse case scenero, you could set them to no-index, or just leave them be. Even if they dont lead anywhere logically, they could still bring you traffic. Or redirect them to the closest thing that is on the site currently.
-
JC,
When you say ...started out 404-ing them...seemed like Google was penalizing my crawl rate..... etc. I have not seen where Google even algorithmically had any real issues with 404's. I your site has 500K pages and 100K are 404'd I do not think it would be a problem for Google per se. (You might have a searcher problem if these were pages that were bookmarked, lots of links, etc.) My caution would be that if you have a lot of pages on the site with links that still go to the 404 pages you could run into UX issues.
For me, I would go with the 404's. I think they will get removed over time.Best
-
When necessary, redirect relevant pages to closely related URLs. Category pages are better than a general homepage.
If the page is no longer relevant, receives little traffic, and a better page does not exist, it’s often perfectly okay to serve a 404 or 410 status codes.
-
You could redirect them to something even remotely relevant even if its the homepage at the end of the day. What ever you do it going to take time and it's going to give you some sort of headache.
What would best suit a user who might land on an old link or somehow get to the page? That would be the best way to find a solution. A good soft 404 or redirect tends to help here.
Best of luck though.
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
-
Google Indexed Site A's Content On Site B, Site C etc
Hi All, I have an issue where the content (pages and images) of Site A (www.ericreynolds.photography) are showing up in Google under different domains Site B (www.fastphonerepair.com), Site C (www.quarryhillvet.com), Site D (www.spacasey.com). I believe this happened because I installed an SSL cert on Site A but didn't have the default SSL domain set on the server. You were able to access Site B and any page from Site A and it would pull up properly. I have since fixed that SSL issue and am now doing a 301 redirect from Sites B, C and D to Site A for anything https since Sites B, C, D are not using an SSL cert. My question is, how can I trigger google to re-index all of the sites to remove the wrong listings in the index. I have a screen shot attached so you can see the issue clearer. I have resubmitted my site map but I'm not seeing much of a change in the index for my site. Any help on what I could do would be great. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cwscontent
Eric TeVM49b.png qPtXvME.png1 -
Redirect old image that has backlinks
Hi Moz Community! I'm doing an audit of a website and did a backlink analysis. In the backlink analysis, there is an image that has 66 backlinks but the image doesn't exist on the website anymore (it was on a website that was created in 2011 - 2 web launches ago). I don't believe a 301 redirect will work for an image that doesn't exist anymore. How would I redirect the image URL (it's WordPress so we have a specific URL that other websites are linking to but get 404 errors) without going to each individual website and requesting they change the URL link? Any advice or recommendations would be great. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BradChandler1 -
301 redirecting a site that currently links to the target site
I have a personal blog that has a good amount of back links pointing at it from high quality relevant authoritative sites in my niche. I also run a company in the same niche. I link to a page on the company site from the personal blog article that has bunch of relevant links pointing at it (as it's highly relevant to the content on the personal blog). Overview: Relevant personal blog post has a bunch of relevant external links pointing at it (completely organic). Relevant personal blog post then links (externally) to relevant company site page and is helping that page rank. Question: If I do the work to 301 the personal blog to the company site, and then link internally from the blog page to the other relevant company page, will this kill that back link or will the internal link help as much as the current external link does currently? **For clarity: ** External sites => External blog => External link to company page VS External sites => External blog 301 => Blog page (now on company blog) => Internal link to target page I would love to hear from anyone that has performed this in the past 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Keyword_NotProvided0 -
Remove URLs that 301 Redirect from Google's Index
I'm working with a client who has 301 redirected thousands of URLs from their primary subdomain to a new subdomain (these are unimportant pages with regards to link equity). These URLs are still appearing in Google's results under the primary domain, rather than the new subdomain. This is problematic because it's creating an artificial index bloat issue. These URLs make up over 90% of the URLs indexed. My experience has been that URLs that have been 301 redirected are removed from the index over time and replaced by the new destination URL. But it has been several months, close to a year even, and they're still in the index. Any recommendations on how to speed up the process of removing the 301 redirected URLs from Google's index? Will Google, or any search engine for that matter, process a noindex meta tag if the URL's been redirected?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trung.ngo0 -
Is 301 redirecting your index page to the root '/' safe to do or do you end up in an endless loop?
Hi I need to tidy up my home page a little, I have some links to our index.html page but I just want them to go to the root '/' so I thought I could 301 redirect it. However is this safe to do? I'm getting duplicate page notifications in my analytic reportings tools about the home page and need a quick way to fix this issue. Many thanks in advance David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | David-E-Carey0 -
301 Redirection problems
A couple of days ago we did a restructure of our e-commerce site (wordpress + woocomerce) where some product categories needed to change names. I used Yoast SEO plugin to do 301 redirects in the .htaccess file.Today I noticed that we had two hits in the SERP on the phrase "dildos med vibrator". See the attached screenshot (first two results).One goes to http://www.oliverocheva.se/kategori/sexleksaker/dildos/dildos-med-vibrator/ which is the right URL. One goes to http://www.oliverocheva.se/kategori/sexleksaker/dildosdildos-med-vibrator-dildos-for-honom/ which is a corrupt URL that has never been in use. The old one we did a redirect from was /kategori/for-honom/dildos-for-honom/dildos-med-vibrator-dildos-for-honom/The command in the .htaccess file was: Redirect 301 /kategori/for-honom/dildos-for-honom/dildos-med-vibrator-dildos-for-honom/ http://www.oliverocheva.se/kategori/sexleksaker/dildos/dildos-med-vibratorWhat has happened here? Why does the 301 create entirely new URL:s in the SERP?Tz0TULT.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kisen0 -
Consolidating MANY separate domains into a much better, single URL: Should I point a landing page or redirect to the new site?
I am consolidating a site for a client who previously, and very foolishly, broke up their domains like so: companyparis.com companyflorence.com companyrome.com etc... I am now done with the new site, which will be at: company.eu with pages as appropriate: company.eu/paris company.eu/florence company.eu/rome This domain, although not entirely new, does not have much authority or rank. In terms of SEO and link-building, is it better to redirect the old domain to the specific page on the new domain: companyparis.com --> company.eu/paris or... is it better to put a landing page at the old domain LINKING to the page on the new domain: companyparis.com --> landing page linking to --> company.eu/paris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thongly0 -
301 redirects from old to new pages whit a lot of changes
Hello all, We are going to restyle and change CMS so all the urls will change. We are also updating content, adding much more content to the old pages trying to be more user and SEO friendly. My doubt is about doing 301 redirects from old to new pages when the content has changed a lot. Does it will mantain the ranking of the page or will crawlers thought that is a total diferent page. For example: one page new page will change from the old one the url, title, headers, meta description, content text and images. Should i maintain old content and do the CMS change with the 301 redirects and later change the content, that means a lot of work, or do it all at once? Thanks in advance Tomas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomas.guemes0