What's the best way to deal with deleted .php files showing as 404s in WMT?
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Disclaimer: I am not a developer
During a recent site migration I have seen a bit of an increase in WMT of 404 errors on pages ending .php. Click on the link in WMT and it just shows as File Not Found - no 404 page. There are about 20 in total showing in webmaster tools and I want to advise the IT department what to do. What is the best way to deal with this for on-page best practice?
Thanks
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Those pages will eventually drop out of Google's index, but if there are still sites (either pages within your own site or others) that are linking to any of those pages you will continue to see 404 error codes. I'm working on fixing the same issue on a site that I just started optimizing.
The best thing you can do is a 301 redirect from each of the old .php pages to a similar, relevant page that currently exists on the site. This will fix the 404 codes and also pass any page authority from the old page to the new page that it is being directed to.
Here's some helpful info from Moz on 301 redirects: http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection
Hope that helps!
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File not found errors should show an http status code of 404. 404 pages will be naturally dropped by Google, I wouldn't worry about them.
Make sure any of those 404'ed pages shouldn't have been 301'ed to a related page, to save any authority, if necessary.
You can use the Moz toolbar to check the http status code too.
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