301 lots of old pages to home page
-
Will it hurt me if i redirect a few hundred old pages to my home page?
I currently have a mess on my hands with many 404's showing up after moving my site to a new ecommerce server. We have been at the new server for 2 years but still have 337 404s showing up in google webmaster tools. I don't think it would affect users as very few people woudl find those old links but I don't want to mess with google.
Also, how much are those 404s hurting my rank?
-
You should try to 301 as many of the dead pagoes as possible to any relevant page you can find. This will pass on the link juice to the new page, especially if it's related content. Otherwise the link juice will be lost and eventually the search engines will drop those pages out of their index. I know doing a couple hundred pages is HUGE task, so I would focus on the most valuable pages first. Ryan is right, 404's is a fact of life. I think it's best to create a custom 404 that your visitors won't mind landing on. For this it's best to be creative, try to make them laugh or smile. Most importantly, give them something to click on. this will allow you to recapture an otherwise lost customer. The very last thing you want them to do is click on their browsers back button.Any visitor can essentially navigate to any of our other pages even though they didn't actually get the page they were originally looking for. Good luck!
-
404s are a natural part of the internet. At times, content is moved and deleted on any site. Your site is not penalized from Google because you have 404 pages.
The primary issue for 404 pages is if any site has linked to the page, the link's value is lost. Also landing on a 404 page is a bad user experience.
If you can look at your known 404 links and redirect each one to the most appropriate page on your site, that would be the best all around. If you redirect the pages to your home page, that is certainly the easy way out for you, but it is not the best user experience. Also you will lose the value of relevancy from anchor text along with link juice leakage.
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
-
Alternatives 301? Issues redirection of index.html page with Adobe Business Catalyst
Hi Moz community, As for now we have two different versions of a client's homepage that’s dividing our traffic. One of the urls is the index.html version of the other url. We are using Adobe Business Catalyst for one of our clients and they told us they can’t 301 redirect. Adobe Business Catalyst does 301 redirects, but not to itself like an .htaccess rewrite. Doing a 301 redirect using BC from index.html to / creates an infinite loop and break the page. Are there alternatives to a 301 or any suggestions how to solve this? Thanks for all your answers and thoughts in advance,
Technical SEO | | Anna_Hoesl
Anna0 -
Why is Google Webmaster Tools showing 404 Page Not Found Errors for web pages that don't have anything to do with my site?
I am currently working on a small site with approx 50 web pages. In the crawl error section in WMT Google has highlighted over 10,000 page not found errors for pages that have nothing to do with my site. Anyone come across this before?
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
Updating inbound links vs. 301 redirecting the page they link to
Hi everyone, I'm preparing myself for a website redesign and finding conflicting information about inbound links and 301 redirects. If I have a URL (we'll say website.com/website) that is linked to by outside sources, should I get those outside sources to update their links when I change the URL to website.com/webpage? Or is it just as effective from a link juice perspective to simply 301 redirect the old page to the new page? Are there any other implications to this choice that I may want to consider? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Liggins0 -
Pages with Duplicate Page Content Crawl Diagnostics
I have Pages with Duplicate Page Content in my Crawl Diagnostics Tell Me How Can I solve it Or Suggest Me Some Helpful Tools. Thanks
Technical SEO | | nomyhot0 -
150 products 301 redirect to HOME page, any impact?
If redirect 150 products to the home page, will I be penalize? It does not look like I can have access to cPanel on this platform, BigCommerce and i moves my old domain to this plateforme, the only option I might have his to redirect everythings to home page. Thank you, BigBlaze
Technical SEO | | BigBlaze2050 -
How to set Home page for the best effect
My head is spinning with all the confusing possibilities. Does anybody have an easy answer for setting up the home page and its canonical-ishness ie Which gives the best SEO Mojo ? \ \default.aspx \keyword\ \keyword\default.aspx Thanking you in advance for reducing the number of business migranes around the globe.
Technical SEO | | blinkybill0 -
Is 301 redirecting all old URLS after a new site redesign to the root domain bad for SEO?
After a new site redesign ...would it hinder our rankings if we 301 redirected all old URLS that are returning 404 error codes to the root domain (home page) ? Would this be a good temporary solution until we are able to redirect the pages to the appropriate corresponding page? Thanks so much!
Technical SEO | | DCochrane0 -
301 for a deleted page?
Which is in your opinion the best "301 practice" to notify Google that a web page does not exists anymore? For example: ...
Technical SEO | | YESdesign
---CATEGORY PAGE
-------SUBCATEGORY PAGE
------------ PRODUCT PAGE 1
------------ PRODUCT PAGE 2
------------ PRODUCT PAGE 3
... If you delete “PRODUCT PAGE 2” does it make sense to create in the .htaccess a 301 redirect towards the “SUBCATEGORY”? Do you have others tested methods to deal with this issue? Thank you in advance for sharing your opinions and ideas. YESdesign0