Massive amount of 404s after forum prune
-
So I pruned my vbulletin forum the other week and now webmaster tools detects over 4000 urls as not found. Is there a solution to this? Is this something that could negatively effect rankings? Any ideas?
-
If they are simply urls that are in the index, they will go away after a few weeks. but if there are links pointing to the deleted pages either internal or external, then you need to take action.
For interal links you should delete the links, for external you should 301 thenm to a relative page
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
-
Spam pages being redirected to 404s but sill indexed
Client had a website that was hacked about a year ago. Hackers went in and added a bunch of spam landing pages for various products. This was before the site had installed an SSL certificate. After the hack, the site was purged of the hacked pages and and SLL certificate was implemented. Part of that process involved setting up a rewrite that redirects http pages to the https versions. The trouble is that the spam pages are still being indexed by Google, even months later. If I do a site: search I still see all of those spam pages come up before most of the key "real" landing pages. The thing is, the listing on the SERP are to the http versions, so they're redirecting to the https version before serving a 404. Is there any way I can fix this without removing the rewrite rule?
Technical SEO | | SearchPros1 -
Sitemaps, 404s and URL structure
Hi All! I recently acquired a client and noticed in Search Console over 1300 404s, all starting around late October this year. What's strange is that I can access the pages that are 404ing by cutting and pasting the URLs and via inbound links from other sites. I suspect the issue might have something to do with Sitemaps. The site has 5 Sitemaps, generated by the Yoast plugin. 2 Sitemaps seem to be working (pages being indexed), 3 Sitemaps seem to be not working (pages have warnings, errors and nothing shows up as indexed). The pages listed in the 3 broken sitemaps seem to be the same pages giving 404 errors. I'm wondering if auto URL structure might be the culprit here. For example, one sitemap that works is called newsletter-sitemap.xml, all the URLs listed follow the structure: http://example.com/newsletter/post-title Whereas, one sitemap that doesn't work is called culture-event-sitemap.xml. Here the URLs underneath follow the structure http://example.com/post-title. Could it be that these URLs are not being crawled / found because they don't follow the structure http://example.com/culture-event/post-title? If not, any other ideas? Thank you for reading this long post and helping out a relatively new SEO!
Technical SEO | | DanielFeldman0 -
Huge uptick in 404s on new website
I just launched a new website, and I see that the 404s shot up hugely in Google Webmaster Tools right during the launch. We went from Drupal to WordPress, but I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts on whether these 404s represent a crisis, or potentially something harmless? There has been no noticeable SEO downtick in terms of keywords or queries during the same period... Thanks for any thoughts. Screenshot-2015-05-19-13.58.55.png
Technical SEO | | yoursearchteam0 -
Forum post multiple pages gives meta description duplicate.
My website has a forum that is using the title of the posts as a Meta Description.The problem is that when a posts becomes long and separates in pages Google tells me that i have duplicate meta description issues because the 2nd page and the 3rd page are using the same meta description.What is the best course of action here?
Technical SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
We have 302 redirect links on our forum that point to individual posts. Should we add a rel="nofollow" to these links?
Moz is showing us that we have a HUGE amount of 302 redirects. These are coming from our community forum. Forum URL: https://www.foodbloggerpro.com/community/ Example thread URL: https://www.foodbloggerpro.com/community/viewthread/322/ Example URL that points to a specific reply: https://www.foodbloggerpro.com/community/viewreply/1582/ The above link 302 redirects to this URL: https://www.foodbloggerpro.com/community/viewthread/322/#1582 My two questions would be: Do you think we should we add rel=nofollow to the specific reply URLs? If possible, should we make those redirects 301 vs. 302? Screencast attached. nofollow_302.mp4
Technical SEO | | Bjork1 -
What to look for when evaluating a forum solution from an SEO perspective
Hi, I am investigating forum solutions. I would be interested in hearing people's thoughts / experience on what criteria and requirements to consider purely from an SEO perspective when looking at a forum solution.
Technical SEO | | JagexSEO0 -
Did Google just release another massive update in September?
Our number of external links has dropped by over 50% in mid-September! So far our domain authority hasn't been impacted and traffic is only slightly down. I did not hear of any major Google changes . . . did this happen to anyone else?
Technical SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Organic Traffic Dropping. 404s found. Is this it?
My organic traffic has dropped 20% in the past month. I noticed some major 404 errors today on a very commonly clicked link on our website. I had the developers fix the error today, but then I thought I'd look in Google Webmaster Tools. That's when I saw the attached picture. 2454 404 errors were found. We only have 1500 pages in the entire Google index. Could this massive amount of 404 errors attribute to this drop in organic traffic? dU240 dU240
Technical SEO | | davewjones0