Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode.

Please download a browser that supports JavaScript, or enable it if it's disabled (i.e. NoScript).

Crawl errors - Deleted wordpress pages should you redirect them if no backlinks

Technical SEO

729

Roboto1970 last edited by

Question answered
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
Roboto1970 last edited by

Hello Logan,

Great thank you for getting back to me. I have gone through and created 410 redirects for all the old content. I guess only time will tell if this is the write solution.

Regards

Rob
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
LoganRay last edited by

Hi Rob,

Since you've got no links pointing to these pages, a 410 would be your best bet. This will get them removed from the index the quickest, and you'll start to see these errors in Search Console drop. Doing 301 redirects would also get them removed from the index, but that's also to slow down your performance, and since these pages can't be accessed other than SERPs anyway, 301s aren't going to provide much long-term value.

Here's some more info on the difference between 404s and 410s: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2340728/matt-cutts-on-how-google-handles-404-410-status-codes
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 2

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.

Start my free trial

Browse Questions

View

From

Sorted by

With category

Explore more categories

Related Questions

520 Error from crawl report with Cloudflare

crawler cloudflare rogerbot 520 server error

I am getting a lot of 520 Server Error in crawl reports. I see this is related to Cloudflare. We know 520 is Cloudflare so maybe the Moz team can change this from "unknown" to "Cloudflare 520". Perhaps the Moz team can update the "how to fix" section in the reporting, if they have some possible suggestions on how to avoid seeing these in the report of if there is a real issue that needs to be addressed. At this point I don't know. There must be a solution that Moz can provide like a setting in Cloudflare that will permit the Rogerbot if Cloudflare is blocking it because it does not like its behavior or something. It could be that Rogerbot is crawling my site on a bad day or at a time when we were deploying a massive site change. If I know when my site will be down can I pause Rogerbot? I found this https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/troubleshooting/general-troubleshooting/troubleshooting-crawl-errors/
Technical SEO | | awilliams_kingston

0
Backlink Redirection as Backlink Building Strategy?

Just checking in - i'm working on a site with tons of broken backlinks from high authority sites. For instance, I've discovered that some 90% of their backlinks are broken, and these are from highly recognizable, name brand magazines, newspapers, blogs and the like. Right now, the site has a Domain Authority of 48 (better than most in the industry from what i am learning) yet as the site has been around for years and has gone through 5 redesigns, there is an absolute ton of solid inbound backlinks that are getting 404's. Using Screaming Frog (list mode) I've also learned there are a ton of 301's that turn out to be redirecting to 404 pages so that also starts to add up. I always knew this was a problem / opportunity and I've always considered it a high priority to fix (301) broken links of this sort to improve ranking (you know, using htaccess or WordPress Redirection tools) -- and to avoid multiple redirects wherever possible. In fact, I consider it a basic all-win, no-lose strategy. I always assumed this was the case and I also assume this will continue to be so. However, as a professional, I always want to double check my assumptions every now and then... Is this still considered solid strategy? Are there any issues that one should look out for?
Technical SEO | | seo_plus

0
Crawl Attempt Errors & Homepage Not Ranking

Hi all, I have scanned the community forum thoroughly to find a solution to this issue and noticed some detailed and informed responses, but I am not sure which apply to the issue we are currently having. We are receiving a lot of 803 Crawl Attempt Errors on a weekly basis for our site www.mangofurniture.co.uk and also our homepage isn't ranking and I can't help but think that the two are linked. We have some rankings for the internal pages and have a couple of other sites that use the same template as www.mangofurniture.co.uk that are doing well with no crawl attempt errors and strong homepage rankings. There are a lot of great resources out there on the Moz forum and elsewhere but I am little unsure what applies to our problem or whether to two are linked at all. We have tried rewriting the homepage and developing the internal linking system but to no success as yet. Also, because the site is fairly new so the link profile is quite small at present. Any advice regarding this would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | FurnitureGeek

0
Redirecting Several Hundred Pages

As of May 21st 2013 (Penguin 2.0 update) we hit a triple-header and I think we can now officially dubbed the "KING OF GOOGLE PANALTIES"! 😞 -July 2012 - recieved 2 "Unatural Links" email -April 2012 - 20% traffic hit -May 21st 2013 - 35% traffic hit We have/had lots of very low quality links using the same anchor text as well as about 150 very low quality articles and almost 100 categories w/several hundred products that recieved little to no traffic. We have spent the last several weeks cleaning up our link profile and were highly successful in getting most of them removed and have kept detailed reports for our Reconsideration Request for the manual "Unatural Links" penalty. We have also went a step further and have completely redesigned the site that is now much faster/better on-page seo with new, high quality articles and are removing all the low quality articles, categories and products but we are unclear what to do with these. Which brings me to my question. Should we redirect these pages back to the home page or just let them go to 404 error? I have been doing lots of reading on this subject but there doesnt seem to be any good answers. From what I read, neither are good choices and I cannot decide between the lesser of the 2 evil's ..so any help with this would be greatly apreciated! Note:
-These category and product pages have absolutly no inbound links (link benefit) and in my opinion are only sucking off link juice and generating little to no revenue. There are also no similar categories or products that these could be redirected to. For example, redirecting dog toys to the dog bed category just sounds like it would increase our bounce rate. -Again, the articles also have no link benefit and only a small handful of the articles actually generate any traffic to speak of (several thousand visitors per year) and the rest generate less than 1000 visitors per year. All have high bounce rates and low conversions. It would be nice to keep them live as I think some are okay and could be rewritten/re-purpose over time but maybe in light of our Panda penalty it might be better to just to save them offline, let them go to 404 errors and rewritten/re-purpose them another time? -We did create a very nice 404 page with category navigation and huge search bar so I am leaning more toward this option.
..
Thank in Advance!
Technical SEO | | k9byron

0
Sitemap as Referrer in Crawl Error Report

I have just downloaded the SEOMoz crawl error report, and I have a number of pages listed which all show FALSE. The only common denominator is the referrer - the sitemap. I can't find anything wrong, should I be worried this is appearing in the error report?
Technical SEO | | ChristinaRadisic

0
I use All in one SEO pack for wordpress and i i have 2 meta tags i need to delete them is this the meta description tag ?

add_option("aiosp_post_meta_tags", '', 'All in One SEO Plugin Additional Post Meta Tags', 'yes'); add_option("aiosp_page_meta_tags", '', 'All in One SEO Plugin Additional Post Meta Tags', 'yes'); add_option("aiosp_home_meta_tags", '', 'All in One SEO Plugin Additional Home Meta Tags', 'yes'); add_option("aiosp_do_log", null, 'All in One SEO Plugin write log file', 'yes'); */
Technical SEO | | fhnhockey088

0
Crawl Errors In Webmaster Tools

Hi Guys, Searched the web in an answer to the importance of crawl errors in Webmaster tools but keep coming up with different answers. I have been working on a clients site for the last two months and (just completed one months of link bulding), however seems I have inherited issues I wasn't aware of from the previous guy that did the site. The site is currently at page 6 for the keyphrase 'boiler spares' with a keyword rich domain and a good onpage plan. Over the last couple of weeks he has been as high as page 4, only to be pushed back to page 8 and now settled at page 6. The only issue I can seem to find with the site in webmaster tools is crawl errors here are the stats:- In sitemaps : 123 Not Found : 2,079 Restricted by robots.txt 1 Unreachable: 2 I have read that ecommerce sites can often give off false negatives in terms of crawl errors from Google, however, these not found crawl errors are being linked from pages within the site. How have others solved the issue of crawl errors on ecommerce sites? could this be the reason for the bouncing round in the rankings or is it just a competitive niche and I need to be patient? Kind Regards Neil
Technical SEO | | optimiz1

0
Redirect

How do I redirect this url: http://www.example.com/img/head/beauty-spa.jpg" width="114" height="50" alt="image"/></a> </div> <div class="c0 r"><a href="/m/imgres?q=short+holiday+treatments Thank you for your help.
Technical SEO | | petrakraft

0