404 errors and what to do

[junglefrog]

Hi,

I am fairly new to the whole seo thing and am still getting confused a bit as to what to do to sort things out. I've checked the help pages but I cannot seem to find the issue. I've just signed up so my site is crawled for the first time and coming up with more then a 1000 404 errors. I checked a couple of the links via the report I downloaded and it does indeed show a 404 error but when I check the pages all seems to work fine.

I did find one issue where an image if clicked on twice was pointing to an url with 'title= at the end. Now I have tried to get of that but couldn't find anything wrong. I'm a bit lost as to where to start!

[JamesNorquay]

Yeah I agree signing up for Webmaster tools is a great way to pull up 404 errors which SEOmoz pro tool have not picked up.

[CraigBradford]

Hi Simone,

It sounds strange that you can access the pages ok but Moz crawl says 404, however, as James said, the process for for fixing 404 errors is to add a 301 redirect to the correct page. If the content is old or no longer there, 301 it to a related page and finally if that isn't an option 301 it to the home page.

Another good way to check what pages Google is getting a 404 on is by signing up for webmaster tools if you haven't already. You can then look in the crawl diagnostics and see 404 pages.

Hope this helps

[JamesNorquay]

Hi the best thing you can do is track down all the 404s which have the most in coming links and then 301 re direct them to the most appropriate related pages. If not just 301 redirect them to the home pages is the next best bet.