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.
Best strategy to handle over 100,000 404 errors.
-
I recently been given a site that has over one-hundred thousand 404 error codes listed in Google Webmasters.
It is really odd because according to Google Webmasters, the pages that are linking to these 404 pages are also pages that no longer exist (they are 404 pages themselves).
These errors were a result of site migration that had occurred.
Appreciate any input on how one might go about auditing and repairing large amounts of 404 errors.
Thank you.
-
This is a pretty thorough outline of what you need to do: http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos
My steps are usually:
- Identify pages that get significant organic traffic by pulling the Organic Traffic report in Google Analytics for the past year or so.
- Identify pages that have a significant number of links (or, have links from high traffic sources) in Open Site Explorer.
- Map where that content should be now, and 301 redirect to new pages.
- Completely remove all old pages from the index by 404ing them and making sure that no links on new pages point to old pages.
Sounds quick and simple, but this definitely takes time. Good luck!
-
Kristina - thanks for the feedback.
By any chance, would you have a site migration guideline that you recommend?
-
There really isn't a problem with having 100,000 404 "errors." Google's telling you that it thinks 100,000 pages exist, but when it tries to find them, it's getting a 404 code. That's fine: 404s tell Google that a page doesn't exist and to remove the page from Google's index. That's what we want.
The real problem is with your site migration, as FCBM pointed out. If you properly 301 redirect old pages to new, Google will be redirected to the new page, it won't just hit a 404. If you fix the problems with the site migration (not focusing on Google too much), the 404 errors will naturally subside.
The other option is to just take the hit from the migration, and Google will eventually remove all of these pages from its index and stop reporting on them, as long as there aren't live links pointing to the removed pages.
Good luck!
-
It is a problem with the site migration.
Never the less, I have a site right now with over 100,000 errors dealing with 404.
I'm looking for a game plan on how to deal with this many 404 errors in a time effective way.
Any ideas with type of tools or shortcuts? Has anyone else had to deal with a similar issue?
-
Here's one thought to start the quest. ID if the migration was done correctly.
eg If you had a site that was example.com/mens did the 301 look like newsite.com/mens? If not then you might be having tons of issues with a bad planned migration.
-
The WMT notion helps. Thank you.
The main concern is really timing. Are there any effective ways of going through thousands of 404 pages and finding valuable redirects?
-
404s are not founds which are fine if they are really not found and there isn't a different url to point the original page to. One big issue could be that during the migration the old pages weren't 301'd which would result in tons of 404s.
Go through the 404s and see if they are issues or just relics from old data. Then you can mark in fixed in WMTs.
Hope that helps
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
-
520 Error from crawl report with Cloudflare
I am getting a lot of 520 Server Error in crawl reports. I see this is related to Cloudflare. We know 520 is Cloudflare so maybe the Moz team can change this from "unknown" to "Cloudflare 520". Perhaps the Moz team can update the "how to fix" section in the reporting, if they have some possible suggestions on how to avoid seeing these in the report of if there is a real issue that needs to be addressed. At this point I don't know. There must be a solution that Moz can provide like a setting in Cloudflare that will permit the Rogerbot if Cloudflare is blocking it because it does not like its behavior or something. It could be that Rogerbot is crawling my site on a bad day or at a time when we were deploying a massive site change. If I know when my site will be down can I pause Rogerbot? I found this https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/troubleshooting/general-troubleshooting/troubleshooting-crawl-errors/
Technical SEO | | awilliams_kingston0 -
Best Practice for www and non www
How is the best way to handle all the different variations of a website in terms of www | non www | http | https? In Google Search Console, I have all 4 versions and I have selected a preference. In Open Site Explorer I can see that the www and non www versions are treated differently with one group of links pointing to each version of the same page. This gives a different PA score. eg. http://mydomain.com DA 25 PA 35 http://www.mydomain.com DA 19 PA 21 Each version of the home page having it's only set of links and scores. Should I try and "consolidate" all the scores into one page? Should I set up redirects to my preferred version of the website? Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | I.AM.Strategist0 -
Find all external 404 errors/links?
Hi All, We have recently discovered a site was linking to our site but it was linking to an incorrect url, resulting in a 404 error. We had only found this by pure chance and wondered if there was a tool out there that will tell us when a site is linking to an incorrect url on our site? Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
404 Error Pages being picked up as duplicate content
Hi, I recently noticed an increase in duplicate content, but all of the pages are 404 error pages. For instance, Moz site crawl says this page: https://www.allconnect.com/sc-internet/internet.html has 43 duplicates and all the duplicates are also 404 pages (https://www.allconnect.com/Coxstatic.html for instance is a duplicate of this page). Looking for insight on how to fix this issue, do I add an rel=canonical tag to these 60 error pages that points to the original error page? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | kfallconnect0 -
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 -
Best way to handle pages with iframes that I don't want indexed? Noindex in the header?
I am doing a bit of SEO work for a friend, and the situation is the following: The site is a place to discuss articles on the web. When clicking on a link that has been posted, it sends the user to a URL on the main site that is URL.com/article/view. This page has a large iframe that contains the article itself, and a small bar at the top containing the article with various links to get back to the original site. I'd like to make sure that the comment pages (URL.com/article) are indexed instead of all of the URL.com/article/view pages, which won't really do much for SEO. However, all of these pages are indexed. What would be the best approach to make sure the iframe pages aren't indexed? My intuition is to just have a "noindex" in the header of those pages, and just make sure that the conversation pages themselves are properly linked throughout the site, so that they get indexed properly. Does this seem right? Thanks for the help...
Technical SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Are 404 Errors a bad thing?
Good Morning... I am trying to clean up my e-commerce site and i created a lot of new categories for my parts... I've made the old category pages (which have had their content removed) "hidden" to anyone who visits the site and starts browsing. The only way you could get to those "hidden" pages is either by knowing the URLS that I used to use or if for some reason one of them is spidering in Google. Since I'm trying to clean up the site and get rid of any duplicate content issues, would i be better served by adding those "hidden" pages that don't have much or any content to the Robots.txt file or should i just De-activate them so now even if you type the old URL you will get a 404 page... In this case, are 404 pages bad? You're typically not going to find those pages in the SERPS so the only way you'd land on these 404 pages is to know the old url i was using that has been disabled. Please let me know if you guys think i should be 404'ing them or adding them to Robots.txt Thanks
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
What are your best tips for SEO on a shopping cart?
So, I am working on a shopping cart platform (X-Cart) and so far don't like it. Also, the web designer is not someone I've worked with before and he is understandably conservative about access--which limits what I can and cannot do from the back end. One of the things I like to do is include text for the search engines. However, based on conversion, etc., I think the product images on a landing page (main brand info with specific products that show up) should show up first to move toward conversion first. I am thinking of adding the text below the product images on the brand pages so the viewer sees the products first while still keeping the content seo. My practice is to use between 300-350 words minimum on a page. Just wondering what best practices you have for a shopping cart. Care to share? Any tips or hints? Thoughts on what I might do that would be most effective? As always, thanks in advance for your sage advice!
Technical SEO | | TheARKlady0