404 Errors
-
Do 404 Errors really have a lot of impact on rankings and over all authority of the site with google? Say you have a site that all the pages have moved apart from the home page which is exactly the same before moving? So most of your pages are showing 404 errros.
-
Hi Adul,
Just to follow up on this in case you're wondering why the answer is being downvoted. Blocking the pages that 404 in robots.txt will only stop Google getting a 404 because they can't reach the page. Users will still get a 404 so this isn't ideal. Also, if you don't 301 redirect the old pages to the new one, you lose any equity that those pages built up over the years.
Hope that helps,
Craig
-
Go to google webmaster tools, > Crawl > Crawl Error .. Download all page
Open excel and paste notepad robots.txt
User-agent: *
disallow: /page1.html
Disallow: /page2.html -
If no one can access your site except for the home page, that is pretty bad.
As to rankings, look at it from a broad perspective. A user clicks a link in search results. That link goes to a 404. They immediately go back and find someone else's site or link to click on. Another user clicks another link for the same broken site. They get a 404 error and do the same thing. Google bot comes along and sees that the site in question has a very low on-page time, and users frequently leave and go somewhere else. They also see a large quanity of the pages dont work.
If you were Google, would you give that site much weight or credit? Or would you hand it to a site that works? I don't think they openly express that it can hurt you, or that they will hurt your ranking for having 404 errors. IMO they do, it's just not as transparent as the rest of the things they state to do to improve your ranking.
-
OP, your case is an extreme one in that every page on the site but the homepage 404s. That means you moved but didn't do any 301 redirects, so that's an issue.
But generally, 404s have no impact on your site's ranking and that's been stated on record multiple times.
-
Hi, the 404 errors are pretty bad and en user experience standpoint and so Google does not like them. During domain migrations, the most important aspect is to control the number of 404 errors to the possible extent if not possible to make them zero.
When pages are moved, you should go in for a one-to-one or page-to-page server-side, 301 permanent redirection from the old pages to the corresponding new locations so that the old pages do not end-up in 404 errors and with 301 in place, Google will know that the old pages are no more in force and that they have been replaced by the new corresponding destinations. This will also make the old ones replaced by the new ones in search engine indices.
So to conclude, 404 errors are bad from both, the users and the search engines.
Hope it helps my friend.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
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 News error in Google Search Console
My google search console states some errors as below: 1. Article fragmented Some of the urls in this error are the category urls. How to make google bot understand it is a category not an article? 2. Article too short In fact the article is quite long. I do not know why this is happen... 3. No sentence found In fact, there are a lot of sentences Please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | binhlai0 -
404's after pruning old posts
Hey all, So after reading about the benefits of pruning old content I decided to give it a try on our blog. After reviewing thousands of posts I found around 2500 that were simply not getting any traffic, or if they were there was 100% bounce & exit. Many of these posts also had content with relevance that had long ago expired. After deleted these old posts, I am now seeing the posts being reported as 404's in Google Search Console. But most of them are the old url with "trashed" appended to the url. My question is: are these 404's normal? Do I now have to go through and set up 301's for all of these? Is it enough to simply add the lot to my robots.txt file? Are these 404's going to hurt my blog? Thanks, Roman
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dynata_panel_marketing0 -
I have 6 URL errors in GSC showing a 500 error code. How do I fix?
I am not sure how to fix some errors that are popping up in Google Search Console. The response codes showing are all: 500 error code I need some advice as to how to fix these. What are my options?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pmull0 -
Ecommerce SEO - Indexed product pages are returning 404's due to product database removal. HELP!
Hi all, I recently took over an e-commerce start-up project from one of my co-workers (who left the job last week). This previous project manager had uploaded ~2000 products without setting up a robot.txt file, and as a result, all of the product pages were indexed by Google (verified via Google Webmaster Tool). The problem came about when he deleted the entire product database from our hosting service, godaddy and performed a fresh install of Prestashop on our hosting plan. All of the created product pages are now gone, and I'm left with ~2000 broken URL's returning 404's. Currently, the site does not have any products uploaded. From my knowledge, I have to either: canonicalize the broken URL's to the new corresponding product pages, or request Google to remove the broken URL's (I believe this is only a temporary solution, for Google honors URL removal request for 90 days) What is the best way to approach this situation? If I setup a canonicalization, would I have to recreate the deleted pages (to match the URL address) and have those pages redirect to the new product pages (canonicalization)? Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | byoung860 -
What are the best ways to fix 404 errors?
I recently changed the url of my main blog and now have about 100 404 errors. I did a redirect from the old url to the new one however still have errors. 1. Should I do a 301 redirect from each old blog post url to the new blog post url? 2. Should I just delete the old blog post (url) and rewrite the blog post? I"m not concerned about links to the old posts as a lot of them do not have many links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
Question regarding error url while checking in open-site explorer tool
Hello friends, My website home url & inner page url shows error while checking the open-site site explorer tool from SEOMoz, for a website** eg.www.abc.com website as**
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zco_seo
**"Oh Hey! It looks like that URL redirects to www.abc.com/error.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/default.aspx. Would you like to see data for that URL instead?"**May I know the reason, why this url showing this result while checking back link report from the tool?**May I know on what basis this tool is evaluating the website url as well?****May I know, Will this affect the Google SERPs for this website?**Thanks0 -
Crawl errors in GWT!
I have been seeing a large number of access denied and not found crawl errors. I have since fixed the issued causing these errors; however, I am still seeing the in webmaster tools. At first I thought the data was outdated, but the data is tracked on a daily basis! Does anyone have experience with this? Does GWT really re-crawl all those pages/links everyday to see if the errors still exist? Thanks in advance for any help/advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Squarespace Errors
We have a website hosted by SquareSpace. We are happy with SS, but have done some crawl diagnostics and noticed several errors. These are primarily: Duplicate Page Title Duplicate Page Content Client Error (4xx) We dont really understand why these errors are taking place, and wonder if someone in the Seomoz forum has a firm understanding of SS who is able to assist us with this? rainforestcruises.com thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RainforestCruises0