404 errors on non-existent URLs
-
Hey guys and gals,
First Moz Q&A for me and really looking forward to being part of the community. I hope as my first question this isn't a stupid one but I was just struggling to find any resource that dealt with the issue and am just looking for some general advice.
Basically a client has raised a problem with 404 error pages - or the lack thereof- on non-existent URLs on their site; let's say for example: 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towels/asdfas'
Obviously content never existed on this page so its not like you're saying 'hey, sorry this isn't here anymore'; its more like- 'there was never anything here in the first place'. Currently in this fictitious example typing in 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towels/asdfas**'** returns the same content as the 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towels' page which I appreciate isn't ideal.
What I was wondering is how far do you take this issue- I've seen examples here on the seomoz site where you can edit the URI in a similar manner and it returns the same content as the parent page but with the alternate address. Should 404's be added across all folders on a site in a similar way? How often would this scenario be and issue particularly for internal pages two or three clicks down? I suppose unless someone linked to a page with a misspelled URL...
Also would it be worth placing 301 redirects on a small number of common mis-spellings or typos e.g. 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towles' to the correct URLs as opposed to just 404s?
Many thanks in advance.
-
Hi Matthew,
Thanks for the prompt response. Yeah, that's pretty much what I was thinking too- I know its a pretty basic aspect but I just sort of wanted someone to corroborate the process- sorry if it sounded like I was suggesting that just because content never existed there it's a reason not to 404- that wasn't my intention.
Thanks again
-
Hi,
My understanding of best practices (and what I've always done on sites I've worked on) is that you do want to return a 404 status code on any non-existent URL regardless of whether or not content existed there in the first place. This is your signal to Google/Bing/the world that this is a bad URL. It doesn't matter the reason that URL is broken really, you just want to make sure Google and Bing know that there is no /beach-towels/asdfas page on your site on the off chance they find it or see a link to it.
If you return the exact same content on /beach-towels/asdfas as you do on /beach-towels/ this does open you up to duplicate content issues because now you have two URLs with the same content. Even though there is a slim chance anybody could discover that an incorrect URL returns duplicate content, you don't want to open yourself to those problems if you can avoid it.
I do think your idea of common misspelling is a really good one and one not enough people take advantage of. I've implemented 301 redirects for common misspellings on other sites. I've found it is especially helpful on short URLs people are likely to type in by hand (for example, people will type in greatbeachtowels.com/beach so it would be worth making sure greatbeachtowels.com/baech or /beech have a 301 redirect over to that other page.
Hope some of my answer can help you out. Good luck!
Thanks,
Matthew
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
-
Error 404, Wordpress adds the domain automaticly to the end of the pages, WHY?
Hello guys, I'm using wordpress and the Yoast to help me improve my SEO. Everything went well except for today because "Moz" found 404 errors when scrolling the website saying showing the domain of my website at the end of 12 url. For example :
Technical SEO | | abonnisseau
www.domain.com/service-1/www.domain.com www.domain.com/contact-page/**www.domain.com ** Do you have any idea where does that come from ? Thanks Alex0 -
Duplicate page errors from pages don't even exist
Hi, I am having this issue within SEOmoz's Crawl Diagnosis report. There are a lot of crawl errors happening with pages don't even exist. My website has around 40-50 pages but SEO report shows that 375 pages have been crawled. My guess is that the errors have something to do with my recent htaccess configuration. I recently configured my htaccess to add trailing slash at the end of URLs. There is no internal linking issue such as infinite loop when navigating the website but the looping is reported in the SEOmoz's report. Here is an example of a reported link: http://www.mywebsite.com/Door/Doors/GlassNow-Services/GlassNow-Services/Glass-Compliance-Audit/GlassNow-Services/GlassNow-Services/Glass-Compliance-Audit/ btw there is no issue such as crawl error in my Google webmaster tool. Any help appreciated
Technical SEO | | mmoezzi0 -
Massive Increase in 404 Errors in GWT
Last June, we transitioned our site to the Magento platform. When we did so, we naturally got an increase in 404 errors for URLs that were not redirected (for a variety of reasons: we hadn't carried the product for years, Google no longer got the same string when it did a "search" on the site, etc.). We knew these would be there and were completely fine with them. We also got many 404s due to the way Magento had implemented their site map (putting in products that were not visible to customers, including all the different file paths to get to a product even though we use a flat structure, etc.). These were frustrating but we did custom work on the site map and let Google resolve those many, many 440s on its own. Sure enough, a few months went by and GWT started to clear out the 404s. All the poor, nonexistent links from the site map and missing links from the old site - they started disappearing from the crawl notices and we slowly went from some 20k 404s to 4k 404s. Still a lot, but we were getting there. Then, in the last 2 weeks, all of those links started showing up again in GWT and reporting as 404s. Now we have 38k 404s (way more than ever reported). I confirmed that these bad links are not showing up in our site map or anything and I'm really not sure how Google found these again. I know, in general, these 404s don't hurt our site. But it just seems so odd. Is there any chance Google bots just randomly crawled a big ol' list of outdated links it hadn't tried for awhile? And does anyone have any advice for clearing them out?
Technical SEO | | Marketing.SCG0 -
404 Error
Hello, Seomoz flagged a url as having a 404 client error. The reason the link doesn't return a proper content page is because the url name was changed. What should we do? Will this error disappear when Google indexes our site again? Or is there some way to manually eliminate it? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | OTSEO0 -
How to keep a URL social equity during a URL structure/name change?
We are in the process of making significant URL name/structure change to one of our property and we want to keep the social equity (likes, share, +1, tweets) from the old to the new URL. We have been trying many different option without success. We are running our social "button" in an iframe. Thanks
Technical SEO | | OlivierChateau0 -
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 -
Disallowing https URLs
It there a problem disallowing all https URLs to be indexed in order to avoid duplication? This is the article recommending this practice - http://blog.leonardchallis.com/seo/serve-a-different-robots-txt-for-https/ Thanks!
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
404 errors and what to do
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!
Technical SEO | | junglefrog0