301s Creating Soft 404s in GWT
-
Hi,
We re-did a section of a site and got rid of hundreds of pages of no longer relevant content. We 301'd the urls to the category homepage. Now, GWT calls these soft 404s.
a) Should we have done something differently instead of 301ing?
b) Are these hundreds of soft 404 errors a big problem or threat to how Google sees us for SEO?
c) Should we correct this in some way?
Thanks... Darcy
-
Can you provide a few example URL's of this error. I will take a closer look and give you a better response.
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
-
Dealing with 404s during site migration
Hi everyone - What is the best way to deal with 404s on an old site when you're migrating to a new website? Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Should I Keep adding 301s or use a noindex,follow/canonical or a 404 in this situation?
Hi Mozzers, I feel I am facing a double edge sword situation. I am in the process of migrating 4 domains into one. I am in the process of creating URL redirect mapping The pages I am having the most issues are the event pages that are past due but carry some value as they generally have one external followed link. www.example.com/event-2008 301 redirect to www.newdomain.com/event-2016 www.example.com/event-2007 301 redirect to www.newdomain.com/event-2016 www.example.com/event-2006 301 redirect to www.newdomain.com/event-2016 Again these old events aren't necessarily important in terms of link equity but do carry some and at the same time keep adding multiple 301s pointing to the same page may not be a good ideas as it will increase the page speed load time which will affect the new site's performance. If i add a 404 I will lose the bit of equity in those. No index,follow may work since it won't index the old domain nor the page itself but still not 100% sure about it. I am not sure how a canonical would work since it would keep the old domain live. At this point I am not sure which direction I should follow? Thanks for your answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Possible problem with new site (GWT no queries/very low index vs. submitted)
Hi everyone, I recently launched a new website for a small business loan company in the Dallas area. The site has been live for roughly a month and a half. I submitted everything to GWT as usual, including my sitemap. I am not sure what's going on with the site, as there is no activity from GWT in the impressions or queries. The submit vs. index is 24/3 (and hasn't moved). Also the queries graph on the overview stops at 3/18/2015... On another note, when I go to Crawl > Sitemaps, it shows that there were pages indexed during the month of march and then on April 3 it drops from 17 to 2 and never increases. Google says there are no errors or issues found, but I feel like there's something wrong. When I do site:, my URLs do pop up which makes me believe there's just a problem with my GWT. With that being said, I'm not happy THINKING there's something wrong. I need to actually know what the problem is. The only thing I can think of that I have done is purchase SSL for the site, but when I search what pages are indexed using www. it shows all the HTTPS URLS, so that would tell me that the site is getting indexed without a problem? Does anyone have a clue as to what might be happening? I will attach some screen shots so that you can get a better idea... KQ2366i D5xBNZf mF7kkgW
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jameswesleyhunt0 -
Is Google creating rich snippets for you? Example inside
Hi MOZ! How are ratings and reviews rich snippets are showing in search for "sephora Urban Decay Naked On The Run" when they don't have that data in their structured data? -- verified with Google Structured Data Testing Tool http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sephora.com%2Fartist-shadow-P387670Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Best software or online tool to create Videos
Kindly let me know best software or online tool to create videos for website and youtube. I am also looking for animation videos etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexanderWhite0 -
What are the SEO issues we should consider on a plug in that creates a custom home page based on zip code or GPS location.
We are developing a plug in the changes the home page relative to a users location or zip code. We believe this will provide users with a more personalized experience. We are concerned about how this might affect SEO. We are also wondering if we should partner with one of the SEO ply in developers. We were thinking about Yoast. Is there another partner that might be better? I would appreciate any feedback people can give.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ron_McCabe0 -
Soft 404
Hey forum, My site is a Price Comparison site. Lately I've been getting some "Soft 404" errors with the Webmaster tool. I'll try to explain the steps causing it: 1. There's a valid link to a product 2. At some point the product is temporary out of stock or unavailable. 3. Google crawls this product page, getting a valid page with a message explaining this product is unavailable at this time. 4. Google see this page for few different products and (I assume) figures it's a none existing page and so it's a soft 404. The possible solutions I see are: 1. Return real 404, I'm not a fan of this solution, because these links will very likely be valid again when the product is back in stock. 2. Live with some "soft 404" errors in the webmaster tool. 3. Find another way to explain to Google that it's not a real 404. This sounds great but I'm not sure how this can be done. Any thoughts which would be the best method? Or maybe another solution I haven't thought of? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corwin0 -
Old pages still crawled by SE returning 404s. Better to put 301 or block with robots.txt ?
Hello guys, A client of ours has thousand of pages returning 404 visibile on googl webmaster tools. These are all old pages which don't exist anymore but Google keeps on detecting them. These pages belong to sections of the site which don't exist anymore. They are not linked externally and didn't provide much value even when they existed What do u suggest us to do: (a) do nothing (b) redirect all these URL/folders to the homepage through a 301 (c) block these pages through the robots.txt. Are we inappropriately using part of the crawling budget set by Search Engines by not doing anything ? thx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | H-FARM0