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
-
404 vs 410 vs 301
Hi guys, I am managing a real estate website, and obviously we have a LOT of pages detailing each property. As those properties get sold and removed from the website, I'm wondering how best to handle this - I know 404, 410 and 301's are all valid ways to go, but I want to provide the best UX combined with the best SEO effect. My thinking is to customise a 410 page to show the page has been permanently removed, and has a relevant message (rather than a generic 404 message) and shows a search box - possibly pre-populated according to the page they were looking for.
Technical SEO | | LoonyToons
I think this gives a good UX and helps Google to understand the importance of the 000's of pages on our website.
I'd also like to clear property detail 404's as quick as possible to make it easier to see if we have problems elsewhere on the site. Having explained this to our development/SEO agency, they are strongly pushing for 301 redirects or leave as 404.
I think 301's would be the worst for UX, and as explained earlier, the volume of 404's is massive and makes it difficult to see real errors. They seem to think this is a better UX and better for SEO. Just wondering what you guys would recommend?0 -
How to solve this merchant error?
Hello All, In my google merchant suddenly lots of warning appeared i.e. 1) Automatic item updates: Missing schema.org microdata price information 2) Missing microdata for condition Can you please tell me how to solve this errors? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | varo
John0 -
Server return 404 and 200 status
Dear All,
Technical SEO | | omverma
We have a website where we are showing some products. Many times it happens when we remove any product and add that again later. In our site, we have product list page and detail page. So if any product get deleted and client hits the detail page with deleted product url, then we are returning 404. Next time when that product will be available our server will return 200. I have two questions : 1. Is is right way to deal with deleted product ? 2. After deploying it, we observed that our keywords ranking is going down, is that really affect ? Thanks,
Om0 -
Pages appear fine in browser but 404 error when crawled?
I am working on an eCommerce website that has been written in WordPress with the shop pages in E commerce Plus PHP v6.2.7. All the shop product pages appear to work fine in a browser but 404 errors are returned when the pages are crawled. WMT also returns a 404 error when ‘fetch as Google’ is used. Here is a typical page: http://www.flyingjacket.com/proddetail.php?prod=Hepburn-Jacket Why is this page returning a 404 error when crawled? Please help?
Technical SEO | | Web-Incite0 -
What Would i do to get my site ranking high?
Hello Friends, I need your help please tell me what would I do to get my site ranking high in Google search engine. When I start my work on my site my work blog commenting , social bookmarking, keyword targeting etc.… But now the scene is completely changing. Now I am working on just guest blogging. I don’t understand that what would I do next after the guest blogging. Because I think there is now just one way to promote your site VIA guest blogging. Now please tell me is there any other option to work and get high ranking?
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
I am using SEOmoz pro software and my blog tags are bringing up 404 errors.
After checking they do bring back a 404 page, so i am wondering what to do. Do i remove all the blog tags? We use a Drupal cms system.
Technical SEO | | AITLtd0 -
Getting a bunch of pages re-crawled?
I added noindex tags to a bunch (1,000+) of paginated category pages on my site. I want Google to recrawl the pages so they will de-index them. Any ideas to speed up the process?
Technical SEO | | AdamThompson0 -
How to resolve duplicate content and title errors?
Hello, I'm new to this resource and SEO. I have taken the time to read other posts but am not entirely sure about the best way to resolve the issues I am experiencing and so am hoping for a helpful hand. My site diagnostics advise me that most of my errors relate to duplicate content and duplicate page titles. Most of these errors seem to relate to our ecommerce product pages. A little about us first, we manufacture and retail over the internet our own line of unique products which can only be purchased through our website. So it’s not so important to make our product pages stand out from competitors. An example of one of our product pages can be found here: http://www.nabru.co.uk/product/Sui+2X2+Corner+Sofa In terms of SEO we are focusing on improving the rankings of our category pages which compete much more with our competitors, but would also like our product pages to be found via a google search for those potential customers that are at the late stage of a buying cycle. So my question: Whilst it would be good to add more content to the product pages, user reviews, individual product descriptions etc (and have good intentions to do this over time, which unfortunately is limited) is there an easy way to fix the duplicate content issues, ensure our products can be found and ensure that the main focus is on our category pages? Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | jannkuzel0