Help with 404 pages
-
Hello everyone,
A few days back, we have permanently removed 3 main categories from our E-commerce website and because of that our more than 50k URLs are showing 404 error (according to Google Search Console).
What are the good practices to handle such extensively 404 pages?
Please help!!
-
Hi there
Matt Cutts actually made some suggestions depending on the size of your site as to what you can do with eCommerce 404 pages. You can learn more about that here.
Here is a resource with some best practices for your 404 page, as well as some great examples that you can take advantage of to make the best user experience possible for 404 pages.
Remember - at the end of the day what matters most is the user experience; if there is a place that they can be redirected to that's relevant to the product or category they were looking for previously, send them there. If there isn't, provide a valuable 404 page that allows them to search, navigate, see other products, coupons, etc. so that they can continue to move through your site instead of getting frustrated and leaving.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
A 404 just tells Google that a page has moved or been removed and that there is nowhere that you would prefer a visitor to be redirected too. There is absolutely no problem with a few 404's or thousands.
Just make sure your 404 page is helpful to people that might land there and don't be tempted to try and redirect where it isn't needed. Make sure there are links to key categories and you can even add a search to the page as well.
-Andy
-
Just let them be there or if they'll get a lot of external links make sure that you redirect the pages to the most relevant page or the homepage.
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
-
How long will old pages stay in Google's cache index. We have a new site that is two months old but we are seeing old pages even though we used 301 redirects.
Two months ago we launched a new website (same domain) and implemented 301 re-directs for all of the pages. Two months later we are still seeing old pages in Google's cache index. So how long should I tell the client this should take for them all to be removed in search?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Liamis0 -
Will more comprehensive content on product pages help improve ranking?
We're working to improve the ranking of one of our product landing pages. The page that currently ranks #1 has a very simple, short layout with the main keyword many times on the page with otherwise very little text. One thought we had was to make a more comprehensive page including more info on the features and benefits of the product. The thought being that a longer form page would be more valuable and potentially look better to Google if the other SEO pieces are on par. Does that make sense to do? Or would it be better to keep the product page simple and make some more related content on our blog linking back to that landing page? Thanks in advance to any help you can provide!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bob_Kastner0 -
Help me to understand why this page doesn't rank
Hello everyone. I am trying to understand why most of my website category pages don't show up in the in the first 50 organic results on Google, despite my high website DA and high PA of those pages. We used to rank high a few years ago, not clear why most of those pages have almost completely disappeared. So, just to take one as an example, please, help me to understand why this page doesn't shows up in the first 50 organic search results for the keyword "cello sheet music": http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Cello.html I really can't explain why, unless we are under some sort of "penalization" or similar (a curse?!)... I have analyzed any possible metric, and can't find a logical explanation. Looking forward for your thoughts guys! All the best, Fab.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
How I can improve my website On page and Off page
My Website is guitarcontrol.com, I have very strong competition in market. Please advice me the list of improvements on my websites. In regarding ON page, Linkbuiding and Social media. What I can do to improve my website ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zoe.wilson170 -
How long takes to a page show up in Google results after removing noindex from a page?
Hi folks, A client of mine created a new page and used meta robots noindex to not show the page while they are not ready to launch it. The problem is that somehow Google "crawled" the page and now, after removing the meta robots noindex, the page does not show up in the results. We've tried to crawl it using Fetch as Googlebot, and then submit it using the button that appears. We've included the page in sitemap.xml and also used the old Google submit new page URL https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url Does anyone know how long will it take for Google to show the page AFTER removing meta robots noindex from the page? Any reliable references of the statement? I did not find any Google video/post about this. I know that in some days it will appear but I'd like to have a good reference for the future. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabioricotta-840380 -
Webmaster or analytics can we find pages that are 404
Hi, Webmaster or analytics can we find pages that are 404 404 landing pages? From which source to what page and from page i get the 404 error when someone accesses my webpage? Need to know which pages are live on sites that are broken in my site Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Better to re-direct to a completely un-related page or 404?
We have about 1000 pages we need to eliminate from our site (of about 18000 URLs). these URLs don't see a ton of traffic, but may have some valuable links. Would we be better to 404 these or re-direct them to our homepage? Could re-directing to our homepage hurt us?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
How do I fix the error duplicate page content and duplicate page title?
On my site www.millsheating.co.uk I have the error message as per the question title. The conflict is coming from these two pages which are effectively the same page: www.millsheating.co.uk www.millsheating.co.uk/index I have added a htaccess file to the root folder as I thought (hoped) it would fix the problem but I doesn't appear to have done so. this is the content of the htaccess file: Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^millsheating.co.uk RewriteRule (.*) http://www.millsheating.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.millsheating.co.uk/ [R=301,L] AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JasonHegarty0