Better to 301 or de-index 403 pages
-
Google WMT recently found and called out a large number of old unpublished pages as access denied errors. The pages are tagged "noindex, follow." These old pages are in Google's index.
At this point, would it better to 301 all these pages or submit an index removal request or what? Thanks... Darcy
-
Sounds solid. Thanks, Dirk!
-
The main reason why errors are listed is that you can solve them (if necessary). If these are old pages that don't have existing links on your pages - you can just forget about these warnings. However, if these warnings appear because actual pages are linking to non-existing pages this will lead to a degraded user experience and user experience is a factor which counts for SEO.
If you look at the 403 errors - normally WMT lists how the bot got to these pages. If the pages that are linking to this 403 pages are still on your site, you have to remove these links.
If you have dropped in traffic, you could try to do a full crawl of your site using screaming frog of Xenu, to do a quick check-up of the technical health of your site.
If you still have an old sitemap, or the most popular pages in Google Analytics from the period before migration, you could also use these url's as input for Screamingfrog - and check if all pages were properly redirected. If errors pop-up, these would be the ones I would redirect. I understood from your initial question that the 403's where coming from very old pages which were never meant to be accessible.
rgds
Dirk
-
Hi Dirk,
Thanks for the message. You may be right. Thing is, GWT's discovery of this large number of now blocked pages (previously indexed) seems to have coincided with a big drop in search overall.
I guess the part that I wonder about it is, if these now blocked pages as 403s are no problem and Google will just figure it out, why does it bother to list them in errors... just in case you didn't know, but that it doesn't in fact care one way or the other search-wise and it won't affect your other pages? Just wondering. Thanks... Darcy
-
It's not really necessary to 301 these pages - a 403 status code informs Google that the access is denied (Literally: The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it. Authorization will not help and the request SHOULD NOT be repeated.)
Normally these pages will disappear from WMT after a while. If you find these 403 annoying in your WMT reports, you can always 301 them - but this isn't strictly necessary.
Removal tool - Google's advice is not to use the tool "to clean up cruft, like old pages that 404" (source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1269119?hl=en).
rgds
Dirk
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
-
Best practice to prevent pages from being indexed?
Generally speaking, is it better to use robots.txt or rel=noindex to prevent duplicate pages from being indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Sort term product pages and fast indexing - XML sitemaps be updated daily, weekly, etc?
Hi everyone, I am currently working on a website that the XML sitemap is set to update weekly. Our client has requested that this be changed to daily. The real issue is that the website creates short term product pages (10-20 days) and then the product page URL's go 404. So the real problem is quick indexing not daily vs weekly sitemap. I suspect that daily vs weekly sitemaps may help solve the indexing time but does not completely solve the problem. So my question for you is how can I improve indexing time on this project? The real problem is how to get the product pages indexed and ranking before the 404 page shows u?. . Here are some of my initial thoughts and background on the project. Product pages are only available for 10 to 20 days (Auction site).Once the auction on the product ends the URL goes 404. If the pages only exist for 10 to 20 days (404 shows up when the auction is over), this sucks for SEO for several reasons (BTW I was called onto the project as the SEO specialist after the project and site were completed). Reason 1 - It is highly unlikely that the product pages will rank (positions 1 -5) since the site has a very low Domain Authority) and by the time Google indexes the link the auction is over therefore the user sees a 404. Possible solution 1 - all products have authorship from a "trustworthy" author therefore the indexing time improves. Possible solution 2 - Incorporate G+ posts for each product to improve indexing time. There is still a ranking issue here since the site has a low DA. The product might appear but at the bottom of page 2 or 1..etc. Any other ideas? From what I understand, even though sitemaps are fed to Google on a weekly or daily basis this does not mean that Google indexes them right away (please confirm). Best case scenario - Google indexes the links every day (totally unrealistic in my opinion), URL shows up on page 1 or 2 of Google and slowly start to move up. By the time the product ranks in the first 5 positions the auction is over and therefore the user sees a 404. I do think that a sitemap updated daily is better for this project than weekly but I would like to hear the communities opinion. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Getting Pages Requiring Login Indexed
Somehow certain newspapers' webpages show up in the index but require login. My client has a whole section of the site that requires a login (registration is free), and we'd love to get that content indexed. The developer offered to remove the login requirement for specific user agents (eg Googlebot, et al.). I am afraid this might get us penalized. Any insight?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheEspresseo0 -
Sitemap not indexing pages
My website has about 5000 pages submitted in the sitemap but only 900 being indexed. When I checked Google Webmaster Tools about a week ago 4500 pages were being indexed. Any suggestions about what happened or how to fix it? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
How do I increase rankings when the indexed page is the homepage?
Hi Forum, This is a two-part question. The first is: "what may be the cause of some rank declines?" and the second is "how do I bring them back up when the indexed page is the homepage?" Over the last week I noticed some declines in several of my top keywords, many of which point to the site's homepage. The site itself is an eCommerce site, which had less visits last week than normal (holidays it seems, since the data jibes with key dates). Can a decline in traffic cause ranking declines? Any other ideas of where to look? Secondly, for those keywords that link to the homepage, how do we bring these back up since a homepage can't be optimized for every single keyword? We sell yoga products and can't have a homepage that is optimized for keywords like "yoga mat," "yoga blocks," "yoga pilates clothing," and several others, as these are our category pages' keywords. Any thoughts? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pano0 -
404'd pages still in index
I recently launched a site and shortly after performed a URL rewrite (not the greatest idea, i know). The developer 404'd the old pages instead of a permanent 301 redirect. This caused a mess in the index. I have tried to use Google's removal tool to remove these URL's from the index. These pages were being removed but now I am finding them in the index as just URL's to the 404'd page (i.e. no title tag or meta description). Should I wait this out or now go back and 301 redirect the old URL's (that are 404'd now) to the new URL's? I am sure this is the reason for my lack of ranking as the rest of my site is pretty well optimized and I have some quality links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mj7750 -
Removing a Page From Google index
We accidentally generated some pages on our site that ended up getting indexed by google. We have corrected the issue on the site and we 404 all of those pages. Should we manually delete the extra pages from Google's index or should we just let Google figure out that they are 404'd? What the best practice here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbuckles0 -
Is it better to link to the root domain or to the language home page?
Hi guys! When dealing with linkbuilding for a multi language page such as www.inmonova.com is it better to get external links pointing at inmonova.com or is it better to point: English links to inmonova.com/en Spanish links to inmonova.com/es German links to inmonova.com/de What is your opinion?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inmonova0