Add noindex,nofollow prior to removing pages resulting in 404's
-
We're working with another site that unfortunately due to how their website has been programmed creates a bit of a mess.
Whenever an employee removes a page from their site through their homegrown 'content management system', rather than 301'ing to another location on their site, the page is deleted and results in a 404.
The interim question until they implement a better solution in managing their website is:
Should they first add noindex,nofollow to the pages that are scheduled to be removed. Then once they are removed, they become 404's?
Of note, it is possible that some of these pages will be used again in the future, and I would imagine they could submit them to Google through Webmaster Tools and adding the pages to their sitemap.
-
Personally I don't think the NoIndex, NoFollow solution is the best because they'll be harming or killing any link equity that was going to the site through that page instead of consolidating it. The best solution would be to come up with the means of adding that 301 as soon as you can so they stop hurting themselves needlessly.
Could they possibly leave the page up and just add some form of "Product Discontinued" type of message on the page to direct people to the most pertinent category page and other listing/product as needed? That way they don't shoot themselves in the foot while they wait on the ability to easily 301 and then once they can they just need to 301 the pages with the "Discontinued" message to one of the relevant pages listed.
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
-
Ridding of taxonomies, so that articles enhance related page's value
Hello, I'm developing a website for a law firm, which offers a variety of services. The site will also feature a blog, which would have similarly-named topics. As is customary, these topics were taxonomies. But I want the articles to enhance the value of the service pages themselves and because the taxonomy url /category/divorce has no relationship to the actual service page url /practice-areas/divorce, I'm worried that if anything, a redundantly-titled taxonomy url would dilute the value of the service page it's related to. Sure, I could show some of the related posts on the service page but if I wanted to view more, I'm suddenly bounced over to a taxonomy page which is stealing thunder away from the more important service page. So I did away with these taxonomies all together, and posts are associatable with pages directly with a custom db table. And now if I visit the blog page, instead of a list of category terms, it would technically be a list of the service pages and so if a visitor clicks on a topic they are directed to /practice-areas/divorce/resources (the subpages are created dynamically) and the posts are shown there. I'll have to use custom breadcrumbs to make it all work. Just wondering if you guys had any thoughts on this. Really appreciate any you might have and thanks for reading
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | utopianwp0 -
Multiple Results On First Page
Hi Guys, First question here, after splitting our content across 2 subdomains (~6 months ago) we've noticed google showing several of our pages on page 1. Would it be better to somehow consolidate to just one page (in the hopes that together it would push the rank higher or is it better left to google to work out on its own? I've attached an example of this happening with one of our targeted keywords. HwEARxd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattjamesaus0 -
Does Google still don't index Hashtag Links ? No chance to get a Search Result that leads directly to a section of a page? or to one of numeras Hashtag Pages in a single HTML page?
Does Google still don't index Hashtag Links ? No chance to get a Search Result that leads directly to a section of a page? or to one of numeras Hashtag Pages in a single HTML page? If I have 4 or 5 different hashtag link section pages , consolidated into one HTML Page, no chance to get one of the Hashtag Pages to appear as a search result? like, if under one Single Page Travel Guide I have two essential sections: #Attractions #Visa no chance to direct search queries for Visa directly to the Hashtag Link Section of #Visa? Thanks for any help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Muhammad_Jabali0 -
Mystery 404's
I have a large number of 404's that all have a similar structure: www.kempruge.com/example/kemprugelaw. kemprugelaw keeps getting stuck on the end of url's. While I created www.kempruge.com/example/ I never created the www.kempruge.com/example/kemprugelaw page or edited permalinks to have kemprugelaw at the end of the url. Any idea how this happens? And what I can do to make it stop? Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Can too many "noindex" pages compared to "index" pages be a problem?
Hello, I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages. Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow". At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages. Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter? Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome. Thank you! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Two Pages with the Same Name Different URL's
I was hoping someone could give me some insight into a perplexing issue that I am having with my website. I run an 20K product ecommerce website and I am finding it necessary to have two pages for my content: 1 for content category pages about wigets one for shop pages for wigets 1st page would be .com/shop/wiget/ 2nd page would be .com/content/wiget/ The 1st page would be a catalogue of all the products with filters for the customer to narrow down wigets. So ultimately the URL for the shop page could look like this when the customer filters down... .com/shop/wiget/color/shape/ The second page would be content all about the Wigets. This would be types of wigets colors of wigets, how wigets are used, links to articles about wigets etc. Here are my questions. 1. Is it bad to have two pages about wigets on the site, one for shopping and one for information. The issue here is when I combine my content wiget with my shop wiget page, no one buys anything. But I want to be able to provide Google the best experience for rankings. What is the best approach for Google and the customer? 2. Should I rel canonical all of my .com/shop/wiget/ + .com/wiget/color/ etc. pages to the .com/content/wiget/ page? Or, Should I be canonicalizing all of my .com/shop/wiget/color/etc pages to .com/shop/wiget/ page? 3. Ranking issues. As it is right now, I rank #1 for wiget color. This page on my site would be .com/shop/wiget/color/ . If I rel canonicalize all of my pages to .com/content/wiget/ I am going to loose my rankings because all of my shop/wiget/xxx/xxx/ pages will then point to .com/content/wiget/ page. I am just finding with these massive ecommerce sites that there is WAY to much potential for duplicate content, not enough room to allow Google the ability to rank long tail phrases all the while making it completely complicated to offer people pages that promote buying. As I said before, when I combine my content + shop pages together into one page, my sales hit the floor (like 0 - 15 dollars a day), when i just make a shop page my sales are like (1k+ a day). But I have noticed that ever since Penguin and Panda my rankings have fallen from #1 across the board to #15 and lower for a lot of my phrase with the exception of the one mentioned above. This is why I want to make an information page about wigets and a shop page for people to buy wigets. Please advise if you would. Thanks so much for any insight you can give me!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SKP0 -
Can SEO increase a page's Authority? Or can Authority only be earned via #RCS?
Hi all. I am asking this question to purposefully provoke a discussion. The CEO of the company where I am the in-house SEO sent me a directive this morning. The directive is to take our Website from a PR3 site to a PR5....in 6 months. Now, I know Page Rank is a bit of a deprecated concept, but I'm sure you would agree that "Authority" is still crucial to ranking well. When he first sent me the directive it was worded like this "I want a plan in place with the goal being to "beat" a specific competitor in 6 months." When I prodded him to define "beat," i.e. did he mean "outrank" for every keyword, he answered that he wanted our site to have the same "Authority" that this particular competitor has. So I am left pondering this question: Is it possible for SEO to increase the authority of a page? Or does "Authority" come from #RCS? The second part of this question is what would you do if you were in my shoes? I have been devoting huge amounts of time on technical SEO because the Website is a mess. Because I've dedicated so much time to technical issues, link-earning has taken a back seat. In my mind, why would anyone want to link to a crappy site that has serious technical issues (slow load times, no persistent cart, lots of 404s, etc)? Shouldn't we make the site awesome before trying to get people to link to us? Given this directive to improve our site's "Authority" - would you scrap the technical SEO and go whole hog into a link-earning binge, or would you hunker down and pound away at the technical issues? Which one would you do first if you couldn't do both at the same time? Comments, thoughts and insights would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo1 -
Do Outbound NoFollow Links Reduce the Page's Ability to Pass PageRank?
I get the recent change where adding a nofollow to one link wont increase the juice passed to other links. I'm wondering if nofollow still passes link-juice into the void. i.e. if a page has $10 of link-juice and has one link then regardless of whether this link is follow or nofollow will the page will leak the same juice? Specifically, Is this site benefitting from having a nofollow on the links in it's car buyer's checklist: http://www.trademe.co.nz/motors/used-cars/mitsubishi/diamante/auction-480341592.htm
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seomoz8steer0