Images Returning 404 Error Codes. 301 Redirects?
-
We're working with a site that has gone through a lot of changes over the years - ownership, complete site redesigns, different platforms, etc. - and we are finding that there are both a lot of pages and individual images that are returning 404 error codes in the Moz crawls. We're doing 301 redirects for the pages, but what would the best course of action be for the images? The images obviously don't exist on the site anymore and are therefore returning the 404 error codes.
Should we do a 301 redirect to another similar image that is on the site now or redirect the images to an actual page? Or is there another solution that I'm not considering (besides doing nothing)?
We'll go through the site to make sure that there aren't any pages within the site that are still linking to those images, which is probably where the 404 errors are coming from. Based on feedback below it sounds like once we do that, leaving them alone is a good option.
-
Hi Garrett,
It really depends on the nature and use of the image. I'd really take that on a case by case basis. If you created unique images that received a ton of links or social shares, or they provided something important to your end users, than sure, recreating them on the same URLs might be a great idea. You might want to spot check a few in AHrefs, OSE and Google ANalytics to see if they were generating buzz, traffic, links or all three. Choose some likely candidates and find out what you see in those tools and let that guide how you proceed. Cheers,
Dana
-
Dana - thanks for the response! That is very helpful. We're going through the site now to make sure that none of the site's pages are still linking to or calling those deleted images, so I'm sure that will help as well.
Do you think it is worth replacing any of those images with another image that has the exact same URL, or just deleting the links and html for them if/when we do find references to them on the site?
-
If the images are no longer on the site it's perfectly acceptable to let them 404. Those 404s aren't going to hurt you. They should eventually drop out of Google's Index, although GWT can have a very long memory and hold on to 404 errors for what seems like forever.
If you think there is value for your end user in redirecting to a relevant image on the current site, that's fine too. I just wouldn't let your motivation be fear that 404 errors are somehow hurting you. If the 404s are resulting because the content has been removed, this is a perfectly acceptable reason to have a 404.
Hope that helps!
Dana
-
Can you let me take a look at it? Feel free to private message me.
Thanks,
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
-
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 -
Client would like to 301 redirect the homepage to a category page
Hello MOZ Community!!! I would like your expert opinions on a scenario, please! My client is an ecommerce company, and currently has one of its category pages outranking its homepage for a few key phrases. The homepage, however, has a better conversion rate. So, the client is asking that we make the homepage the category URL, so http://www.theirsite.com/blue-clothes. The existing homepage URL - http://www.theirsite.com - would 301 REDIRECT to the category page - which would render the current version of the homepage. Therefore, there would be nothing, ZERO content, on the MAIN URL: http://www.theirsite.com Has anyone ever done this before? What are the pros and the cons of this practice? Here is my same client, for reference: https://moz.com/community/q/issue-with-category-ranking-on-page-1-vs-homepage-ranking-on-page-2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | accpar0 -
Can I undo 301 redirects to purchase site
A website I am thinking of buying has 301 redirected all pages on his site to one page that explains the site is closing down. If I tell him to change the 301 to 302s will I be able to recover the old pages on the site and keep the authority, rankings and link power of the old pages and not the "Closing page"? Is all i have to do is undo the 301 redirects and everything will go back to how the site was before the 301s were in place? Or will I lose all the link power on individual pages because they already transferred to the "Closing page"? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atomiconline0 -
What things should I consider if I am doing a 301 redirect on only 1 page/blog post?
I wrote a blog post on one of my websites and it got picked up by reddit and I got a bunch of nice backlinks and now that website got a nice boost overall, and especially that blog post page. I now wish I would have posted the article on a different website of mine. I would prefer if this other site was getting the traffic and the good backlinks that I've acquired. What are the pros and cons if I move the content over to my other website, and 301 redirect just that one article to the article location on my other website? The blog post I wrote almost instantly began ranking for certain terms in Google. Ideally I would like my other website to rank for those terms, but I realize there will be some differences as search engines look at the website as a whole and take many factors into consideration. I know there are tons of case studies and information about moving entire sites etc but I couldn't find much on this. Any advice, questions or comments would be greatly appreciated. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bradbowman
Brad0 -
How do i migrate from Volusion to Magento with the same domain using 301 redirect?
We are thinking about migrating our site from Volusion to Magento due to traffic reasons, our site's been growing and we're going way over the bandwidth limit (40gb) for Volusion every month. It only make sense for us to start on Magento CE where we can host it on our site and use our own bandwidth. We will be using the same domain, and changing our URLs to make things better (we were somewhat restricted by Volusion so we couldn't optimize some of our URL addresses). Here's comes the main question, since we are ranking pretty good for the keywords that we're targeting, we ABSOLUTELY DON'T want to lose any traffic or ranking from our pages, I know that there's something called the 301 redirect that we can use, but how can this be done? When we migrate the site, we will need to point our domain to Magento from Volusion, so basically Volusion store will be down... if we are changing domain names then the 301 redirect makes sense because we can have the original store live while it's redirecting to a completely new address. Is there any method to still setup this 301 redirect, or is there something else I can do to save our rankings??? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s2bkevin0 -
301 Redirect htaccess
Hi Guys, I have a website that has plenty of links with parameters. For example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | UrbanMark
http://www.domainname.co.uk/index.php?app=ecom&ns=catshow&ref=Brandname-Golf-Shorts&sid=201v04gxs2hlozv161tfo43qk98583el I want to place a wildcard redirect on the .htaccess but don't know what exactly code for this. Ideally I want the URLs above to be: http://www.domainname.co.uk/Category/Brandname-Golf-Shorts Any help pls. Thanks,
Brucz0 -
Do I need to use canonical tags if I'm 301 redirecting pages?
I just took a job about three months and one of the first things I wanted to do was restructure the site. The current structure is solution based but I am moving it toward a product focus. The problem I'm having is the CMS I'm using isn't the greatest (and yes I've brought this up to my CMS provider). It creates multiple URL's for the same page. For example, these two urls are the same page: (note: these aren't the actual urls, I just made them up for demonstration purposes) http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Omnipress
http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/bossman.cmsx (I know this is terrible, and once our contract is up we'll be looking at a different provider) So clearly I need to set up canonical tags for the last two pages that look like this: With the new site restructure, do I need to put a canonical tag on the second page to tell the search engine that it's the same as the first, since I'll be changing the category it's in? For Example: http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/ will become http://www.website.com/home/MEET-OUR-TEAM/team-leaders/boss-man My overall question is, do I need to spend the time to run through our entire site and do canonical tags AND 301 redirects to the new page, or can I just simply redirect both of them to the new page? I hope this makes sense. Your help is greatly appreciated!!0 -
How do I 301 Redirect a complete folder?
Hi, I am want to delete a folder and all the contents. I then need to redirect anyone that is trying to reach a file in that folder to another page on my site. example: www.mydomain.com/folder/ (contains 50 pages) I want to delete the folder and all 50 pages. So if someone tries to reach www.mydomain.com/folder/page1.php the redirect would take them to a specific page on my site. Doing this to clean up old content. How would I do this on the .htaccess? I have redirected a page but not a folder. Thanks in advance! Force7
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Force70