Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Google Search Console Showing 404 errors for product pages not in sitemap?
-
We have some products with url changes over the past several months. Google is showing these as having 404 errors even though they are not in sitemap (sitemap shows the correct NEW url).
Is this expected? Will these errors eventually go away/stop being monitored by Google?
-
@woshea Implement 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new ones. This tells search engines that the old page has permanently moved to a new location. It also ensures that visitors who click on old links are redirected to the correct content.
-
Yes, it is not uncommon for Google to show 404 errors for products with URL changes, even if the correct new URLs are listed in the sitemap. This is because Google's crawlers may take some time to recrawl and update their index with the new URLs.
Typically, these 404 errors should eventually go away and stop being monitored by Google once the search engine has fully indexed and recognized the new URLs. However, the time it takes for this process to happen can vary based on the frequency of Googlebot's crawls and the size of your website. I am also facing this issue in my site flyer maker app and resolve this issue using the below techniques.
-
Ensure that your sitemap is up-to-date and includes all the correct URLs for your products.
-
Check for any internal links on your website that may still be pointing to the old URL and update them to the new URL.
-
Use 301 redirects from the old URL to the new URL. For example, set up a 301 redirect from product old URL to product new URL. This tells Google and other search engines that the content has permanently moved to a new location.
-
-
@woshea Yes, it is not uncommon for Google to show 404 errors for products with URL changes, even if the correct new URLs are listed in the sitemap. This is because Google's crawlers may take some time to recrawl and update their index with the new URLs.
Typically, these 404 errors should eventually go away and stop being monitored by Google once the search engine has fully indexed and recognized the new URLs. However, the time it takes for this process to happen can vary based on the frequency of Googlebot's crawls and the size of your website. I am also facing this issue in my site flyer maker app and resolve this issue using the below techniques.
-
Ensure that your sitemap is up-to-date and includes all the correct URLs for your products.
-
Check for any internal links on your website that may still be pointing to the old URL and update them to the new URL.
-
Use 301 redirects from the old URL to the new URL. For example, set up a 301 redirect from product old URL to product new URL. This tells Google and other search engines that the content has permanently moved to a new location.
-
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
-
Are there ways to avoid false positive "soft 404s" by Google
Sometimes I get alerts from Google Search Console that it has detected soft 404s on different websites, and since I take great care to never have true soft 404s, they are always false positives. Today I got one on a website that has pages promoting some events. The language on the page for one event that has sold out says that "tickets are no longer available" which seems to have tripped up Google into thinking the page is a soft 404. It's kind of incredible to me that in the current era we're in, with things like chatGPT that Google doesn't seem to understand natural language. But that has me thinking, are there some strategies or best practices we can use in how we write copy on the page so Google doesn't flag it as soft 404? It seems like anything that could tell a user that an item isn't available could trip it up into thinking it is a 404. In the case of my page, it's actually important information we need to tell the public that an event has sold out, but to use their interest in that event to promote other events. so I don't want the page deindexed or not to rank well!
Technical SEO | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
Best practices for retiring 100s of blog posts?
Hi. I wanted to get best practices for retiring an enterprise blog with hundreds of old posts with subject matter that won't be repurposed. What would be the best course of action to retire and maintain the value of any SEO authority from those old blog pages? Is it enough to move those old posts into an archive subdirectory and Google would deprioritize those posts over time? Or would a mass redirect of old blog posts to the new blog's home page be allowed (even though the old blog post content isn't being specifically replaced)? Or would Google basically say that if there aren't 1:1 replacement URLs, that would be seen as soft-404s and treated like a 404?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | David_Fisher0 -
Search Console Missing field 'mainEntity'
Hello,
SEO Tactics | | spaininternship
I am with a problem, in my site I added a faq with schema structure (https://internships-usa.eu/faq/). But is appearing the following problem in Search Console:
Missing field 'mainEntity' ["WebPage","FAQPage"],"@id":"https://internships-usa.eu/faq/#webpage","url":"https://internships-usa.eu/faq/","name":"Help Center - Internships USA","isPartOf":{"@id":"https://internships-usa.eu/#website"},"datePublished":"2022-05-31T14:43:15+00:00","dateModified":"2022-06-01T08:07:13+00:00","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https://internships-usa.eu/faq/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https://internships-usa.eu/faq/"]}]}, What do I have to do to solve this?0 -
Wrong page title in Google
Hi there, A while ago we took over the domain www.hoesjes.nl and forwarded it to our website www.telefoonhoesjesxl.nl. If you perform a search for the keyword 'hoesjes' in Google then we (www.telefoonhoesjesxl.nl) show up on an organic number 1 position. The problem is that the page title isn't correct. Google shows the page title of the website hoesjes.nl we took over and (correctly?) redirected to our domain www.telefoonhoesjesxl.nl. Does anybody have any idea how to get rid of this wrong page title in Google?
Technical SEO | | MarcelMoz
Here you can find a screenshot of what I mean. Thanks! Marcel0 -
Hundreds of 404 errors are showing up for pages that never existed
For our site, Google is suddenly reporting hundreds of 404 errors, but the pages they are reporting never existed. The links Google shows are clearly spam style, but the website hasn't been hacked. This happened a few weeks ago, and after a couple days they disappeared from WMT. What's the deal? Screen-Shot-2016-02-29-at-9.35.18-AM.png
Technical SEO | | MichaelGregory0 -
Tags showing up in Google
Yesterday a user pointed out to me that Tags were being indexed in Google search results and that was not a good idea. I went into my Yoast settings and checked the "nofollow, index" in my Taxanomies, but when checking the source code for no follow, I found nothing. So instead, I went into the robot.txt and disallowed /tag/ Is that ok? or is that a bad idea? The site is The Tech Block for anyone interested in looking.
Technical SEO | | ttb0 -
Google's "cache:" operator is returning a 404 error.
I'm doing the "cache:" operator on one of my sites and Google is returning a 404 error. I've swapped out the domain with another and it works fine. Has anyone seen this before? I'm wondering if G is crawling the site now? Thx!
Technical SEO | | AZWebWorks0 -
Is it bad to have same page listed twice in sitemap?
Hello, I have found that from an HTML (not xml) sitemap of a website, a page has been listed twice. Is it okay or will it be considered duplicate content? Both the links use same anchor text, but different urls that redirect to another (final) page. I thought ideal way is to use final page in sitemap (and in all internal linking), not the intermediate pages. Am I right?
Technical SEO | | StickyRiceSEO1