404 Errors - How to get rid of them?
-
Hi,
I am starting an SEO job on an academic site that has been completely redone.
The SEOMoz crawl detected three 404 Errors to pages that cannot be found anywhere on either Joomla or the server.
What can I do to solve this?
Thanks!!
-
Thanks a lot for answering. This was very helpful.
M.
-
I totally agree. Best way forward. By the way, well done on only having 3 404 errors on re-doing a whole website
-
Export the SEOmoz crawl report to Excel. The "referrer" field will show the URL of the web page which contains the bad link. Locate the link and either fix it or remove it. Those three 404 errors will then be resolved.
-
Hi Michal,
It could sound a bit odd, but if there are only three pages marked as 404 error pages don't spend (to much) time on it. Especially if you can't find them yourself then you're users probably also won't find them and so Google won't make this a problem. We had 404 errors ourselves which couldn't be found also but they don't make a difference in my opinion.
A good source of information to find the pages who link to your current 404 pages is in my opinion the Crawl Errors within Google Webmaster Tools. If Google also found the same three pages they will give you the linked from pages.
Hope this helps!
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
-
Duplicate content and 404 errors
I apologize in advance, but I am an SEO novice and my understanding of code is very limited. Moz has issued a lot (several hundred) of duplicate content and 404 error flags on the ecommerce site my company takes care of. For the duplicate content, some of the pages it says are duplicates don't even seem similar to me. additionally, a lot of them are static pages we embed images of size charts that we use as popups on item pages. it says these issues are high priority but how bad is this? Is this just an issue because if a page has similar content the engine spider won't know which one to index? also, what is the best way to handle these urls bringing back 404 errors? I should probably have a developer look at these issues but I wanted to ask the extremely knowledgeable Moz community before I do 🙂
Technical SEO | | AliMac260 -
60,000 404 errors
Do 404 errors on a large scale really matter? I'm just aware that I now have over 60,000 and was wondering if the community think that I should address them by putting 301 redirects in place. Thanks
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Product pages getting no internal links in Magento
Hello I think i have a serious problem. Most of my products are not getting internal links.
Technical SEO | | macrovet
I discoverd this when i was running a Crawl Test Tool Report | Moz Here an example of one product.
This product can be navigate to a normal way true the navigation structure on my website. The navigation is http://www.macrovet.nl/scheermachine/scheerapparaat-paard-paardenscheermachine.html
On this page is the product URL: http://www.macrovet.nl/aesculap-econom-equipe-gt674.html
Time Crawled 2014
Title tag: Aesculap Econom Equipe GT674 | Macrovet.nl
Meta Description: Bekijk en bestel een Aesculap Econom Equipe GT674 paardenscheermachine voor de scherpste prijs Macrovet.nl
HTTP Status Code: 200
Referrer http://www.macrovet.nl/sitemap.xml
Link Count: 550
Content-Type Header: text/html; charset=UTF-8
4XX (Client Error): NO
5XX (Server Error): NO
Title Missing or Empty: No
Duplicate Page Content: NO
URLs with Duplicate Page Content (up to 5)
Duplicate Page Title:No
Long URL NO
Overly-Dynamic URL NO
301 (Permanent Redirect) NO
302 (Temporary Redirect) NO
301/302 Target
Meta Refresh NO
Meta Refresh Target
Title Element Too Short NO
Title Element Too Long No
Too Many On-Page Links YES
Missing Meta Description Tag No
Search Engine blocked by robots.txt No
Meta-robots Nofollow No
Meta Robots Tag INDEX,FOLLOW
Rel Canonical Yes
Rel-Canonical Target http://www.macrovet.nl/aesculap-econom-equipe-gt674.html
Blocking All User Agents No
Blocking Google No
Internal Links 0
Linking Root Domains 0
External Links 0
Page Authority 1 Domain Autority 30 Do you have an answer what is wrong, thanks for your answers Regards,
Willem-Johan0 -
Increase 404 errors or 301 redirects?
Hi all, I'm working on an e-commerce site that sells products that may only be available for a certain period of time. Eg. A product may only be selling for 1 year and then be permanently out of stock. When a product goes out of stock, the page is removed from the site regardless of any links it may have gotten over time. I am trying to figure out the best way to handle these permanently out of stock pages. At the moment, the site is set up to return a 404 page for each of these products. There are currently 600 (and increasing) instances of this appearing on Google Webmasters. I have read that too many 404 errors may have a negative impact on your site, and so thought I might 301 redirect these URLs to a more appropriate page. However I've also read that too many 301 redirects may have a negative impact on your site. I foresee this to be an issue several years down the road when the site has thousands of expired products which will result in thousands of 404 errors or 301 redirects depending on which route I take. Which would be the better route? Is there a better solution?
Technical SEO | | Oxfordcomma0 -
How to properly remove 404 errors
Hi, According to seomoz report I have two 404 errors on my site. (http://screencast.com/t/2FG8fA1dvGB) I removed them from google webmasters central about 2 weeks ago (http://screencast.com/t/MQ8XBvrFm ) , but they're still showing as an error in the next report (weekly update). Is there anything else you do about 404 or just remove urls through gwc? Or maybe seomoz data is delayed? Thanks in advance, JJ
Technical SEO | | jjtech0 -
Increase in authorization permission errors error after site switch
We launched our new site 2 days ago , since site was down for 12 hours for maintenance, we saw google webmaster tool shows this error . Since then google hasnt crawled, its been 36 hours. Do we need to do anyting? We have close to a million page google crawled before and I am wondering if this will effect anything.
Technical SEO | | tpt.com0 -
Will I still get Duplicate Meta Data Errors with the correct use of the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags?
Hi Guys, One of our sites has an extensive number category page lsitings, so we implemented the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags for these pages (as suggested by Google below), However, we still see duplicate meta data errors in SEOMoz crawl reports and also in Google webmaster tools. Does the SEOMoz crawl tool test for the correct use of rel="next" and "prev" tags and not list meta data errors, if the tags are correctly implemented? Or, is it necessary to still use unique meta titles and meta descriptions on every page, even though we are using the rel="next" and "prev" tags, as recommended by Google? Thanks, George Implementing rel=”next” and rel=”prev” If you prefer option 3 (above) for your site, let’s get started! Let’s say you have content paginated into the URLs: http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1
Technical SEO | | gkgrant
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=4 On the first page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1, you’d include in the section: On the second page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2: On the third page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3: And on the last page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=4: A few points to mention: The first page only contains rel=”next” and no rel=”prev” markup. Pages two to the second-to-last page should be doubly-linked with both rel=”next” and rel=”prev” markup. The last page only contains markup for rel=”prev”, not rel=”next”. rel=”next” and rel=”prev” values can be either relative or absolute URLs (as allowed by the tag). And, if you include a <base> link in your document, relative paths will resolve according to the base URL. rel=”next” and rel=”prev” only need to be declared within the section, not within the document . We allow rel=”previous” as a syntactic variant of rel=”prev” links. rel="next" and rel="previous" on the one hand and rel="canonical" on the other constitute independent concepts. Both declarations can be included in the same page. For example, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2&sessionid=123 may contain: rel=”prev” and rel=”next” act as hints to Google, not absolute directives. When implemented incorrectly, such as omitting an expected rel="prev" or rel="next" designation in the series, we'll continue to index the page(s), and rely on our own heuristics to understand your content.0 -
Why do I get duplicate page title errors.
I keep getting duplicate page title errors on www.etraxc.com/ and www.etraxc.com/default.asp, which are both pointing to the same page. How do i resolve this and how bad is it hurting my SEO.
Technical SEO | | bobbabuoy0