400+ deleted pictures, 404 on URLs, can they be deleted without penalty?
-
A client had a website redesign and over 400 pictures (she's a photographer) were lost. The URL's (ending in .png) are hanging out there and according to the site scan, they have a matching current URL. Since the pictures are gone can the URL be deleted?
-
No problem, happy to help
If you are on WordPress, then I'd highly recommend Yoast's premium plugin as you can set up 410s via the plugin (see screen shot attached) - it's super handy! If you're not using Yoast premium, then it is probably best to chat to your web developer.
I hope that helps!
Cheers,
Casey -
Thank you Casey. I'm honestly not familiar with a 410 header, a chance to learn something new!
If you have any advice about it I'd be grateful
-
Hi there!
If the pictures aren't going to be reloaded (so you can 301 redirect the old URL to the new URL) then in my opinion it would be best to make sure you set a 410 HTTP header (aka a content deleted header) for all those URLs.
The 410 header would be better suited (from what you have said above) as it's more specific. When it comes to Google and 410s, Google will understand you have removed the URL on purpose and if the URLs are indexed, then it should removed them.
I hope that helps!
Cheers,
Casey
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 would you address these URLS
Hey Mozzers, long time no post. Just a quick one for you regarding URLS, this is an example of a url on a site https://www.thisismyurl.co.uk/products/spacehoppers/special-spacehopper.html Many of these pages are getting flagged for having a url that is too long. The target of this page is "special spacehoppers". Should i be concerned with the url being to long given my keyword is at the end? Would this be a suitable idea? https://www.thisismyurl.co.uk/p/spacehoppers/special.html Would changing products to p be worthwhile? It would remove length from nearly all urls but would require a site wide re-direct. 2)Would removing the "spacehoppers" bit from the url be worth it? Yes it would shorten the url but would also remove the exact keyword from the url which could be detrimental to rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP0 -
404 Error Complications
Hello Moz World! I am receiving a 404 error on one of my webpages. When I directly input the URL into my search bar I receive a 404 error. However, when I am on my website and link over to the broken webpage from my website I do not receive an error. The page will show up with no issues, and the address in the URL is the address that is receiving the 404 error. i.e. www.mywebsite.com/services Does anyone know how i should go about troubleshooting this issue? Any suggestions on how I can resolve this? To me, I would think that if the link is not broken when being directed from the website, it shouldn't be broken when entering the url directly into the search bar. Right? Any info/advice is appreciated. B/R Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarketingChimp100 -
Replace dynamic paramenter URLs with static Landing Page URL - faceted navigation
Hi there, got a quick question regarding faceted navigation. If a specific filter (facet) seems to be quite popular for visitors. Does it make sense to replace a dynamic URL e.x http://www.domain.com/pants.html?a_type=239 by a static, more SEO friendly URL e.x http://www.domain.com/pants/levis-pants.html by creating a proper landing page for it. I know, that it is nearly impossible to replace all variations of this parameter URLs by static ones but does it generally make sense to do this for the most popular facets choose by visitors. Or does this cause any issues? Any help is much appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ennovators0 -
Is 1:1 301 redirect required on indexed URL when restructing URL even if the new URL is canonicalized?
Hello folks, We are restructuring some URLS which forms a fair chunk of the content of the domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB17
These content are auto generated rather than manually created unlike other parts of the website. The same content is currently accessible from two URLs: /used-books/autobiography-a-long-walk-to-freedom-isbn
/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-isbn The URL 1 uses the URL 2 as the canonical url and it has worked allright since Moz does
not show the two as duplicate of each other. Google has also indexed the canonical URL although
there is still a few 'URL 1s' which were indexed before the canonical was implemented. The updated URL structure will look like something like this: /used-books/autobiography-a-long-walk-to-freedom-author-name-isbn
/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-authore-name-isbn It would be great to have just a single URL but a few business requirement prevents
us from having just the canonical URL only even with the new structure. Since we will still have two URLs to access the same content and we were wondering
whether we will need to do a 1:1 301 redirect on the current URLs or since there will be canonical URL
(/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-authore-name-isbn),
we won't need to worry about doing the 1:1 redirect on the the indexed content? Please note that the content will still be accessible from the OLD URL (unless 301ed of course). If it is advisable to do a 1:1 301 redirect this is what we intend to do: /used-books/autobiography-a-long-walk-to-freedom-isbn 301 to
/used-books/autobiography-a-long-walk-to-freedom-author-name-isbn /autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-isbn 301 to
/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-authore-name-isbn Any advice/suggestions would be greated appreciated. Thank you.0 -
Confused: Url Restructure
Hello, We're giving our website a bit of a spring clean in terms of SEO. The site is doing ok, but after the time invested in SEO, content and last year's migration of multiple sites into one, we're not seeing the increase in traffic we had hoped. Our current urls look something like this: /a-cake-company/cup-cakes/strawberry We have the company name as the first level as we with the migration we migrated many companies into one site. What we're considering is testing some pages with a structure like this: /cup-cakes/cup-cake-company-strawberry So we'll lose a level and we'll focus more on the category of the product rather than the brand. What's your thoughts on this? We weren't going to do a mass change yet, just a test, but is this something we should be focusing on? In terms of organisation our current url structure is perfect, but what about from an SEO point of view? In terms of keywords customers are looking for both options. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB170 -
Clean URL help!
Hi all, In short, i'm looking to redirect examplepage.html to examplepage .I've got rid of the .html, sitewide this morning. However I want to redirect Google & people who have bookmarked the old url structure. Currently if you have the extension on or not, it will show in your browser. I'm wanting /examplepage.html to 301 redirect to /examplepage I've gone the normal way I'd do it by adding in .htaccess: Redirect 301 /examplepage.html http://www.example.com/examplepage I'm assuming it isn't redirecting as the example.html page is no longer... what is the way around this? Thanks for any help! In firefox the error of the page is: The page isn't redirecting properly Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Whittie0 -
Can your site be penalized for changing the url structure and if so how long till you get back?
I'm doing well on yahoo and bing and the only reason I can think of for why I'm not showing on Google is because I changed the url structure a couple of months ago. I have solid on and off page done for this site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deciph220 -
Do 404 Errors hurt SEO ?
I recently did a crawl test and it listed over 10,000 pages, but around 282 of them generated 404 errors (bad links) I'm wondering how much this hurts overall SEO and if its something I should focus on fixing asap ? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RagingBull0