What should I do with all these 404 pages?
-
I have a website that Im currently working on that has been fairly dormant for a while and has just been given a face lift and brought back to life. I have some questions below about dealing with 404 pages.
In Google WMT/search console there are reports of thousands of 404 pages going back some years. It says there are over 5k in total but I am only able to download 1k or so from WMT it seems.
I ran a crawl test with Moz and the report it sent back only had a few hundred 404s in, why is that?
Im not sure what to do with all the 404 pages also, I know that both Google and Moz recommend a mixture of leaving some as 404s and redirect others and Id like to know what the community here suggests.
The 404s are a mix of the following:
Blog posts and articles that have disappeared (some of these have good back-links too)
Urls that look like they used to belong to users (the site used to have a forum) which where deleted when the forum was removed, some of them look like they were removed for spam reasons too eg /user/buy-cheap-meds-online and others like that
Other urls like this /node/4455 (or some other random number)
Im thinking I should permanently redirect the blog posts to the homepage or the blog but Im not sure what to do about all the others? Surely having so many 404s like this is hurting my crawl rate?
-
OK will try that thanks
-
thanks, I have planned to do that, there's so many of them though
-
The posts and articles with good backlinks, does that content still make sense in your renewed site? If so, I'd bring them back. If you don't have the content, you can try the Wayback Machine. The same goes for any old posts you think would be useful to your new readers.
The problem with redirecting a bunch of 404s to the same page (like the homepage) is that you end up with soft 404s and not a very good user experience. Pick the ones that correspond to specific pages that you have on the updated site and redirect those to the equivalent page.
Anything else, I'd let 404. A bunch of old posts, with no good links, the content of which you no longer have a use for on the site don't represent value to searchers—those pages will just drop out of Googles index (and crawl attempts) over time.
[This isn't just theoretical. We changed domains back in November and we had lots of old content—going back 10+ years, which is ancient history for a financial publisher. I ended up with about 6,000 404s. We are now down to about 4,000 404s as pages drop off. Google crawls us quickly and regularly and our organic traffic is up 86.49% .]
-
Remove all internal links leading to 404 pages. If you're using a redirect, your internal links shouldn't link to 404+302->new page either, link straight to the new source.
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
-
An informational product page AND a shop page (for same brand)
Hi all, This is my first foray into e-commerce SEO. I'm working with a new client who sells upscale eBikes online. Since his products are expensive, he wants to have informational pages about the brands he sells eg. www.example.com/brand. However these brands are also category pages for his online shop eg. www.example.com/shop/brand I'm worried about keyword cannibalization and adding an extra step/click to get to the shop (right now the navigational menu takes you to the information page and from there you have to click to get to the shop) I'm pretty sure it would make more sense to have ONE killer shopping page that includes all the brand information but I want to be 100% sure before I advise him to take this big step. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | MouthyPR1 -
Overdynamic Pages - How to Solve it?
Hi everyone, I'm running a classified real estate ads site, where people can publish their apartment or house they want to sell, so we use multiple filters to help people find what they want. Lately we added multiple filters to the URL to make the search more precise, things like: Prices (priceAmount=###) Bedrooms (BedroomsNumber=2) Bathrooms (BathroomsNumber=3) TotalArea (totalArea=1_50) Services (Elevator, CommonAreas, security) Among other Filters so you see the picture, all this filters are on the URL so that people can share their search on multiple social media, that makes two problems for moz crawl: Overdynamic URLs Too long URLs Now what would be a good solution for this 2 problems, would a canonical to the original page before the "?" would be ok? Example:
Technical SEO | | JoaoCJ
http://urbania.pe/buscar/venta-de-propiedades?bathroomsNumber=2&services=gas&commonAreas=solarium The problem I have with this solution is that I also have a pagination parameter (page=2), and I'm using prev and next tags, if I use a such canonical will break the prev and next tag? http://urbania.pe/buscar/venta-de-propiedades?bathroomsNumber=2&services=gas&commonAreas=solarium&page=2 Also thinking if adding a noindex on pages with paramters could also be an option. Thanks a lot, I'm trying to address this issues.0 -
Yoast SEO. After set up 404 error pages
Hello all, Something strange happened with my blog site. I recently signed to MOZ tools. Initially everything was fine, but during my last crawl I got loads of 404
Technical SEO | | A_Fotografy
pages. Few days ago I was tweaking some settings in SEO plugin according to this post https://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success What I noticed was that 404 pages were coming from my blog posts, but for
some reason category was missing in those posts. For example this link is 404
https://a-fotografy.co.uk/inchcolm-island-wedding-photography-bailie The one with category is https://a-fotografy.co.uk/wedding-pictures/inchcolm-island-wedding-photography-bailie/ So basically for some reason category was missing. Please let me know how can I fix this instead of doing hundreds of
redirects now. Thank you,
Regards,
Armands0 -
Local City Pages
Anyone have any input on the tactics being used for a national company trying to target local city pages. For instance, you might be a national printing company and you are trying to compete against local printers in cities by creating a specific page for that city + print keywords.
Technical SEO | | waqid0 -
Wordpress html page
Hi, WE are designing new agency site which contain from then 100 page. Which URL is best excample.com/about/ or excample/about.html excample.com/service/ or excample/service.html
Technical SEO | | srinathk0 -
New EMD update effected my mom's legit author page? From page 1 in SERP to nowhere for her name
I think my mom's site, MargaretTerry.com was hit by this update for her name "Margaret Terry". Went from bouncing around the first page on google.com and .ca all the time to nowhere on the index. The results are now very strange, a mix of Youtube, linked in, and small book stores that she has done events at recently to promote her first book. I was checking after some of my SEO buddys were freaking out about their EMD's getting hit on Sunday. She is an aspiring author with a book coming out this month. There is obviously no ads or spam content on the site... I have never done SEO for it either except a bit of on page I guess. It sucks that people might be grabbing her book soon and when they Google her name nothing shows up. This couldn't have really happened at a worse time. Not to mention the hours spent building the site to her liking, free of charge of course 🙂 Is there anyone I can contact there to help me out? Shouldn't and EMD that is someones name still rank when you search their name?
Technical SEO | | Operatic0 -
Backlinks to home page vs internal page
Hello, What is the point of getting a large amount of backlinks to internal pages of an ecommerce site? Although it would be great to make your articles (for example) strong, isn't it more important to build up the strength of the home page. All of My SEO has had a long term goal of strengthening the home page, with just enough backlinks to internal pages to have balance, which is happening naturally. The home page of our main site is what comes up on tons of our keyword searches since it is so strong. Please let me know why so much effort is put into getting backlinks to internal pages. Thank you,
Technical SEO | | BobGW0 -
Is this 404 page indexed?
I have a URL that when searched for shows up in the Google index as the first result but does not have any title or description attached to it. When you click on the link it goes to a 404 page. Is it simply that Google is removing it from the index and is in some sort of transitional phase or could there be another reason.
Technical SEO | | bfinternet0