What to do about old urls that don't logically 301 redirect to current site?
-
Mozzers,
I have changed my site url structure several times.
As a result, I now have a lot of old URLs that don't really logically redirect to anything in the current site.
I started out 404-ing them, but it seemed like Google was penalizing my crawl rate AND it wasn't removing them from the index after being crawled several times. There are way too many (>100k) to use the URL removal tool even at a directory level.
So instead I took some advice and changed them to 200, but with a "noindex" meta tag and set them to not render any content. I get less errors but I now have a lot of pages that do this.
Should I (a) just 404 them and wait for Google to remove (b) keep the 200, noindex or (c) are there other things I can do? 410 maybe?
Thanks!
-
"So instead I took some advice and changed them to 200, but with a "noindex" meta tag and set them to not render any content. I get less errors but I now have a lot of pages that do this."
I would not recommend keeping it that way. You could mass redirect them to the sitemap page if they are passing PR and or some traffic, and there is no logical other place to point them.
404's are not really something that can hurt you, providing that they are coming from external sources and you aren't providing 404 links on your site to dead pages on your site, if there are these, then you should fix the internal links at the source.
-
I dont think 404 errors hurt your site. If you have that many pages, they are most likely crawling your site a lot anyway. Have you set your crawl frequency in your sitemap? On bigger sites that get frequent updates, we set the crawl frequency to daily rather than weekly.
If possible, try to see if there are any top level items you can submit a URL removal request for. Hopefully this can speed up the process fo getting the URL's removed. This process can take a long time for Google to take care of. After changing websites we still had 404 errors after 6 months, even after submitting the URL removal request.
Another option is to have the page render a 410 rather than a 404. A 410 states to the search engine the page is gone, and will not be coming back. If you are using some form of cart system or cms there might be a way to apply the code to a large number of pages at once, rather than trying to manually code 100k pages.
"410 Gone
The requested resource is no longer available at the server and no forwarding address is known. This condition is expected to be considered permanent. Clients with link editing capabilities SHOULD delete references to the Request-URI after user approval. If the server does not know–or has no facility to determine–whether or not the condition is permanent, the status code 404 (Not Found) should be used instead of 410 (Gone). This response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise."Worse case scenero, you could set them to no-index, or just leave them be. Even if they dont lead anywhere logically, they could still bring you traffic. Or redirect them to the closest thing that is on the site currently.
-
JC,
When you say ...started out 404-ing them...seemed like Google was penalizing my crawl rate..... etc. I have not seen where Google even algorithmically had any real issues with 404's. I your site has 500K pages and 100K are 404'd I do not think it would be a problem for Google per se. (You might have a searcher problem if these were pages that were bookmarked, lots of links, etc.) My caution would be that if you have a lot of pages on the site with links that still go to the 404 pages you could run into UX issues.
For me, I would go with the 404's. I think they will get removed over time.Best
-
When necessary, redirect relevant pages to closely related URLs. Category pages are better than a general homepage.
If the page is no longer relevant, receives little traffic, and a better page does not exist, it’s often perfectly okay to serve a 404 or 410 status codes.
-
You could redirect them to something even remotely relevant even if its the homepage at the end of the day. What ever you do it going to take time and it's going to give you some sort of headache.
What would best suit a user who might land on an old link or somehow get to the page? That would be the best way to find a solution. A good soft 404 or redirect tends to help here.
Best of luck though.
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
-
How to handle potentially thousands (50k+) of 301 redirects following a major site replacement
We are looking for the very best way of handling potentially thousands (50k+) of 301 redirects following
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GeezerG
a major site replacement and I mean total replacement. Things you should know
Existing domain has 17 years history with Google but rankings have suffered over the past year and yes we know why. (and the bitch is we paid a good sized SEO company for that ineffective and destructive work)
The URL structure of the new site is completely different and SEO friendly URL's rule. This means that there will be many thousands of historical URL's (mainly dynamic ones) that will attract 404 errors as they will not exist anymore. Most are product profile pages and the God Google has indexed them all. There are also many links to them out there.
The new site is fully SEO optimised and is passing all tests so far - however there is a way to go yet. So here are my thoughts on the possible ways of meeting our need,
1: Create 301 redirects for each an every page in the .htaccess file that would be one huge .htaccess file 50,000 lines plus - I am worried about effect on site speed.
2: Create 301 redirects for each and every unused folder, and wildcard the file names, this would be a single redirect for each file in each folder to a single redirect page
so the 404 issue is overcome but the user doesn't open the precise page they are after.
3: Write some code to create a hard copy 301 index.php file for each and every folder that is to be replaced.
4: Write code to create a hard copy 301 .php file for each and every page that is to be replaced.
5: We could just let the pages all die and list them with Google to advise of their death.
6: We could have the redirect managed by a database rather than .htaccess or single redirect files. Probably the most challenging thing will be to load the data in the first place, but I assume this could be done programatically - especially if the new URL can be inferred from the old. Many be I am missing another, simpler approach - please discuss0 -
Why isn't Google indexing this site?
Hello, Moz Community My client's site hasn't been indexed by Google, although it was launched a couple of months ago. I've ran down the check points in this article https://moz.com/ugc/8-reasons-why-your-site-might-not-get-indexed without finding a reason why. Any sharp SEO-eyes out there who can spot this quickly? The url is: http://www.oldermann.no/ Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
INEVO, digital agency0 -
Pages that 301 redirect to a 404
We are going through a website redesign that involves changing URL's for the pages on our site. Currently all our pages are in the format domain.com/example.html and we are moving to stip off the .html file extension so it would just be domain.com/example We have thousands of pages as the site deals with news so building a redirect for each individual page isn't really feasible. My plan is to have a generic rewrite rule that redirects any page that ends .html to the stripped off version of this. A problem I can see with this is that it will also redirect pages that don't exist. So for example, domain.com/non-existant-page.html would 301 to domain.com/non-existant-page which would then return a 404 status. What would the SEO repercussions be for this? Obviously if a page doesn't exist already then it shouldn't show up in the search engine indexes and shouldn't be a problem but I'm a bit worried about how old pages that currently legitimately 404 will be treated when they start to 301 redirect to a 404 instead. Not sure if there any other potential issues from this that I've missed either? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbb0240 -
Site was moved, but still exists on the old server and is being outranked for it's own name
Recently, a client went through a split with a business partner, they both had websites on the same domain, but within their own sub directories. There is a main landing page, which links to both sites, the landing page sits on the root. Ie. example.com is a landing page with links to example.com/partner1, and example.com/partner2 Parter 2 will be my client for this example. After the split, partner 2 downloaded his website, and put it up on his own server, but no longer has any kind of access to the old servers ftp, and partner 1 is refusing to cooperate in any way to have the site removed from the old server. They did add a 301 redirect for the home page on the old server for partner 2, so, example.com/partner2/index.html is 301'ing to the new site on the new server, HOWEVER, every other page is still live on that old server, and is outranking the new site in every instance. The home page is also being outranked, even with the 301 redirect in place. What are some steps I can take to rectify this? The clients main concern is that this old website, containing the old partners name, is outranking him for his own name, and the name of his practice. So far, here's what i've been thinking: Since the site has poor on-page optimization, i'll start be cleaning all of that up. I'll then optimize the home page to better depict the clients name and practice through proper usage of heading tags, titles, alt, etc, as well as the meta title and description. The only other thing I can think of would be to start building some backlinks? Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RCDesign740 -
301 Redirects?
We have an e-commerce website with about 4500 products for sale. About 1200 of these items were not showing up in the Google PLA ads because they were $0 dollar items, so we made those products invisible. Then Set 301 Redirects for each of the 1200 items. My question is this; we want to turn back on the 1200 items, should we delete the 301 redirects that are in place for them.? Will it hurt SEO performance by having them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Goriilla0 -
Need help on SEO for my site. Can't figure out what is wrong.
My site, findyogi.com, isn't ranking well in google SERPs. For some good content and matching keyword, my pages are ranking 200+ whereas other sites that have similar or lower authority are ranking in top 10. I must be doing something fundamentally wrong but can't seem to figure out what. I am not looking at ranking 1 on google right now but my pages don't appear even on page 2-4. Sample Keyword- "Samsung galaxy s4 price in india" . Matching page - www.findyogi.com/mobiles/samsung/samsung-galaxy-s4-b94a37/price Please help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | namansr0 -
301 redirect rule
Hi there, I have a website that has hundreds of links with a "question mark" at the end of URLs. For example: http://www.domain.com/directory/page.html?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQandil
http://www.domain.com/directory/another-directory?
http://www.domain.com/directory/yet-another-directory/? I'm want to place a wildcard redirect on the .htaccess file but don't know what exactly to add. Ideally I want the URLs above to be: http://www.domain.com/directory/page.html
http://www.domain.com/directory/another-directory/
http://www.domain.com/directory/yet-another-directory/ Any help is most appreciated. Thanks
Issa0 -
Does 301 Redirect works on social signals?
Hello, I'm considering strategic change in my site's formation.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
301 redirecting some of the pages is not a problem but the question remains - what will happen with all of my social signals? These pages have Likes, plus ones, and tweets. Thanks0