Cleaning WP theme 404s in GSC

[Millermore]

I'm trying to clean all of the Crawl Errors for my sites, and I've reached the point where I've become slightly confused. A lot of these pages that come up in Crawl Errors aren't being linked to anywhere. The ones I'm referring to are mostly pages that came with a theme that I'm using - part of the demo content - which I've since set to Unpublished Drafts. I'm not linking to these pages anywhere on any of my Published pages, yet Google is still looking for them, still showing them in Crawl Errors as Not Found.

I'm assuming that Google found these pages at some point and can't find them now. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to keep setting up 301 redirects for these, or should I use the Disavow tool for these pages? I want to tell Google to forget these pages completely because I never intended for these pages to be indexed.

This happens for just about all of my Wordpress websites in Google Search Console. Can someone please shed some light on this? If there are any articles on this problem, please share! Thanks!

[evolvingSEO]

Hey Trenton

Do the pages in fact return a 404 code now? You can check with http://urivalet.com/ set to Googlebot. Are they indexed in Google? search for the URL and put 'site:' before it. If they 404 and are indexed, it will just take time for them to drop out. Google continues to crawl pages they had once discovered, but are not linked to anymore, and these will definitely show up in your crawl errors. Pages with crawl errors are actually a good thing if that's what you expect and intended which in this case, it was I know it stinks to have errors showing up in the report, when in fact they are not really errors you have to "fix", but just think of it more like a report, and some pages it's perfectly OK to have 404'ing.

[CleverPhD]

Couple of thing as one who deals with 1,000+ 404s in Google Search Console at any one time and also dealt with leaky CMS systems.

A) Dealing with 404s in Google search console

1. Small thing, if these pages are gone and 404 and will not come back, consider showing a 410 (permanent gone) vs a 404, but either will work.

2. Make sure you have a useful 404 page when people land there so that they can go somewhere else if they need.

3. VERY IMPORTANT - DO NOT mark a 404 as "fixed" in Google Search Console, if the page is supposed to 404.

Why?  Because if the 404 is fixed, then Google will expect to see a 200/ok response!   It will then say, "Oh, the webmaster said this was fixed, but I still see the 404 so I will put it back in the 404 report to help this webmaster."  You will then see the 404 show back up in your console after you removed it and then you start that weird eye twitch that you get when you start to stress.  In fact, I have found if I ever marked a page that is supposed to 404 as "fixed" it takes it that much longer to get out of the 404 report.

What search console needs is a way to mark a 404 in the crawl report and say, "Yep, I see it and it is supposed to 404" in addition to the "Fixed" option.

Rule of thumb, if the page is supposed to 404 let it 404 and just ignore it in the crawl errors of Google webmaster tools / search console.  You do not need to "fix" anything.  The 404s will drop out after about 3 months.  I just check the 404s and then sort by date to see the newest.  If they are supposed to 404 (see point below) I leave them alone and don't stress.

All the other stuff about removing URLs is usually a waste of time.  Just let Google do its work.

If you don't believe me, just ask Google

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html  "If some URLs on your site 404, this fact alone does not hurt you or count against you in Google’s search results."

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-404-20738.html "Google's Gary Illyes responded in short to a Google Panda question, asking if having 404ed pages have an impact on the overall Google Panda algorithm. Gary said on Twitter, "nope," it does not.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2409439?hl=en  Google's webmaster docs _"_Generally, 404 errors don’t impact your site’s ranking in Google, and you can safely ignore them."

All of the above assumes that these are pages that are supposed to 404.  In other words, they are pages that you did not try to use for ranking, etc.  If these were important pages, like home pages or landing pages, then sure a 404 is bad it would negatively impact ranking of those pages. Good pages you want to fix, yes.  Bad pages, just let them die and remove links to them as well for a good user experience.

B) Dealing with leaky CMS systems

I know this may not be your case right now, but it seems to have been before and so wanted to toss this out there as well.  Somewhere, there is (or was) a link to these drafts you mention that are out in the public.  You need to search Google, look through Moz or Majestic or use Screaming Frog to find how these drafts got linked to.   If you look in search console, you should be able to click the 404 errors and see where they are linked from as a clue.

Until you fix the leak, you will end up with wet shoes every time.  Here is an example of where a person was using custom code to display posts, and the code was showing draft posts by accident: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/draft-posts-showing-up-in-recent-posts-feed

Hope this helps!

[Millermore]

Here is the article I was referring to: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1269119?hl=en

[Millermore]

I should've said the "Remove URLs" tool instead of the Disavow Tool. Yes, Disavow Tool is to disavow incoming links that you don't want. The Remove URL tool is to remove content from Google, but I went through their little page about how to use the Remove URL tool and it says don't use it to get rid of content that doesn't exist anymore, and that Google will naturally find it. Well, how long does that take? Months? And what happens if I do use it? Ugh, this is very annoying as it is affecting a lot of my websites, and I don't know how much of an impact these Crawl Errors actually have on my site. Again, I understand the value of links that people are actually linking to, but this is more like hidden content that Google found, which I've gotten rid of, but they're still looking for it. Any help is appreciated.

[Millermore]

The pages exist, but they are unpublished drafts, not accessible to the public. I have marked them as fixed and they keep popping up.

I've checked the site and I'm not linking to them on any of the pages that are live. It just seems like before I marked them as drafts, Google spotted them and is still looking for them. They were never in any sitemap I've submitted before, so I'm confused by this. I've also opened up a thread in the past regarding why some 404 crawl errors come up for desktop, and why different ones come up under Smartphone.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Also to mention this but you can't disavow your own pages, as it's a feature that is mostly used to 'remove' backlinks for outside root domains.

[DennisSeymour]

Hi!

As long as they arent live anymore on your site, just mark them as fixed in search console.

Just double check/crawl your site to make sure non of them really exist anywhere