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 -
I have a lot of spammy links coming to my 404 page (the URLs have been removed now). Should i re-direct to Home?
I have a lot of spammy links pointing at my website according to MOZ. Thankfully all of them were for some URLs that we've long since removed so they're hitting my 404. Should i change the 404 with a 301 and Re-Direct that Juice to my home page or some other page or will that hurt my ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jagdecat0 -
Pages Returning A 403 Error
Hiya Moz Community I hope you are all great, I have a question regarding one of my websites, I have the main site and 2 sub folder sites essentially, I decided to upgrade one of the sites and placed it in a different sub folder, I then set up a 301 redirect to the new location, so far so good, I have been having a look at my link profile using AHrefs, inside there is an SEO report facility, I ran the report and I have over 500 pages returning a 403 or Forbidden error. my question is whether the Equity from those pages is being passed to the new site? I actually removed all the old site from Google Cache to avoid misleading visitors, I suppose I could set the re-directs up manually if I the equity is not being passed to the new site although I was under the impression it would be, or 85% - 90% of it would be anyway. The reason why I am asking is that I have seen a significant drop in rankings for keywords that my site has always ranked highly for. thought I would see if you guys can clear that up for me. Thanks and regards Wes Dunn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wesdunn19770 -
Huge increase in server errors and robots.txt
Hi Moz community! Wondering if someone can help? One of my clients (online fashion retailer) has been receiving huge increase in server errors (500's and 503's) over the last 6 weeks and it has got to the point where people cannot access the site because of server errors. The client has recently changed hosting companies to deal with this, and they have just told us they removed the DNS records once the name servers were changed, and they have now fixed this and are waiting for the name servers to propagate again. These errors also correlate with a huge decrease in pages blocked by robots.txt file, which makes me think someone has perhaps changed this and not told anyone... Anyone have any ideas here? It would be greatly appreciated! 🙂 I've been chasing this up with the dev agency and the hosting company for weeks, to no avail. Massive thanks in advance 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | labelPR0 -
Using two 404 NOT FOUND pages
Hi all, I was wondering if any of you can advise whether it's no issue to use two separate custom 404 pages. The 404 pages would be different for different parts of the site. For instance, if you're on /community/ and you enter a non-existing page on: www.sample.com/community/example/ it would give you a different 404 page than someone who runs into a non existing page at: www.sample.com/definition/example/ Does anybody have experience with this and would this be fine?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RonFav0 -
Can an incorrect 301 redirect or .htaccess code cause 500 errors?
Google Webmaster Tools is showing the following message: _Googlebot couldn't access the contents of this URL because the server had an internal error when trying to process the request. These errors tend to be with the server itself, not with the request. _ Before I contact the person who manages the server and hosting (essentially asking if the error is on his end) is there a chance I could have created an issue with an incorrect 301 redirect or other code added to .htaccess incorrectly? Here is the 301 redirect code I am using in .htaccess: RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/.]+/)*(index.html|default.asp)\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(([^/.]+/)*)(index|default) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www.example.com)?$ [NC] RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L] Could adding the following code after that in the .htaccess potentially cause any issues? BEGIN EXPIRES <ifmodule mod_expires.c="">ExpiresActive On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn
ExpiresDefault "access plus 10 days"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 week"
ExpiresByType text/plain "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 week"
ExpiresByType application/x-icon "access plus 1 year"</ifmodule> END EXPIRES (Edit) I'd like to add that there is a Wordpress blog on the site too at www.example.com/blog with the following code in it's .htaccess: BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress Thanks0 -
What to do when all products are one of a kind WYSIWYG and url's are continuously changing. Lots of 404's
Hey Guys, I'm working on a website with WYSIWYG one of a kind products and the url's are continuously changing. There are allot of duplicate page titles (56 currently) but that number is always changing too. Let me give you guys a little background on the website. The site sells different types of live coral. So there may be anywhere from 20 - 150 corals of the same species. Each coral is a unique size, color etc. When the coral gets sold the site owner trashes the product creating a new 404. Sometimes the url gets indexed, other times they don't since the corals get sold within hours/days. I was thinking of optimizing each product with a keyword and re-using the url by having the client update the picture and price but that still leaves allot more products than keywords. Here is an example of the corals with the same title http://austinaquafarms.com/product-category/acans/ Thanks for the help guys. I'm not really sure what to do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aronwp0 -
How do you find the source of a 404
I've recently noticed quite a sharp rise in the number of 404 errors on our site. Unsurprising really as we have just had a major upgrade of our site navigation. When looking in GA at the landing page stats the vast majority of them are from Google organic search. How do I find the source of the 404? All help appreciated. Thanks. Jon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TTS_Group0