Can you 404 any forms of URL?
-
Hi seomozzers,
<colgroup><col width="548"></colgroup>
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F256%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F258%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F242%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F257%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F260%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F225%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F251%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F176%23comment-form |These are duplicate content and the canonical version is: http://www.ex.com/user (login and pass page of the website)
Since there were multiple other duplicates which mostly have been resolved by 301s, I figured that all "LOGIN" URLs (above) should be 404d since they don't carry any authority and 301 those wouldn't be the best solution since "too many 301s" can slow down the website speed.
But a member of the dev team said:
"Looks like all the urls requested to '404 redirect' are actually the same page http://ex.com/user/login. The only part of the url that changes is the variables after the "?" . I don't think you can (or highly not recommended) make 404 pages display for variables in a url. "
So my question is: I am not sure what he means by that? and Is it really better to not 404 these?
Thanks
-
I believe this file is the base template for all the others. So if you put it on the main one, it should be on the others. That is why I suggested to add it and then view the code of the others to verify it is there as well.
-
Hi Dr.Peter,
Thanks for this great suggestion but could you tell me if the canonical would be a solution and if yes, could you tell me if my answer to Brent is right?
Thanks
-
Thanks Brent,
Interesting, I thought you would put the canonical version of the URL on all duplicates. Have you done it before?
-
I believe all you have to do is put this tag
On the main login page (should be the same url) and it will cover all variations.
If you aren't sure, go ahead and add it then view the source code of the pages above to see if they all have the same rel=canonical tag.
-
Hey Brent,
For Rel=canonical
I should insert this tag:
rel="canonical" href="http://www.ex.com/user/login" />
in each of these pages
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F256%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F258%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F242%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F257%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F260%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F225%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F251%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F176%23comment-form |Is that correct?
Thanks
-
I would either go with parameter blocking or META NOINDEX this page (that's probably a bit more effective). It would be better to block it from Google than to 404 100s of variants, as you could see a spike in 404s and that can cause some problems.
Sorry, edited this - you don't want to 404 the login pages, because that's going to return a 404 for visitors as well, and the pages won't function properly. You want to just keep this away from the bots.
-
Are they actual not found pages? If not then I wouldn't 404 them, and I have never tried to 404 parameters.
Also, I would make sure you setup a rel=canonical tag. This will also help with the duplicates.
-
Drupal and Logintoboggan is maybe not configured correctly. It seems that cleanurls is not setup as well.
Maybe that will solve your issues?
-
Thanks Brent:)
But can you tell me why this wouldn't be good to 404? what is the reason behind that statement?
Thanks
-
Instead of trying to 404 those, I would suggest utilizing GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) and use their "URL Parameters". This will allow you to tell Google not to index all of them.
Log into GWT, under "Site configuration" select "URL paremters".
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
-
Can you help by advising how to stop a URL from referring to another URL on my website please?
Stopping a redirect from one URL to another due to a 404 error? Referred URL which is (https://webwritinglab.com/know-exactly-what-your-ideal-clients-want-in-8-easy-steps/%5Bnull%20id=43484%5D) Referring URL (https://webwritinglab.com/know-exactly-what-your-ideal-clients-want-in-8-easy-steps/)
Technical SEO | | Nichole.wynter20200 -
Same URL names in one domain
Hi All, I have 9 different subdirectories for languages in the same domain example: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page-uk.html www.example.com/es/page-es.html we are implementing hreflang tags for the languages. I know it is better to translate URLs, but we won't for now, because all the NON-ASCII characters. But we are thinking to get rid of the dashes on the languages URL: -uk or -es, so it will be: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page.html www.example.com/es/page.hrml would this be a problem? to have same page names even if they are in different subdirectories? would we need to add canonical tags, at least for the main domain URLs? www.example.com/page.html Thank you, Rachel
Technical SEO | | RaquelSaiz0 -
Does 404 hurts my website.?
Does 404 hurts my website.? My website reporting 404 crawl errors on pages that have never been part of the website. Site showing lot of 404 errors and all errors from Blog.We didn't create any pages .Automatically pages are created and showing 404 (Not Found) error response..Please any one help me to identify those issues.?
Technical SEO | | nlogix0 -
Redirect URLS with 301 twice
Hello, I had asked my client to ask her web developer to move to a more simplified URL structure. There was a folder called "home" after the root which served no purpose. I asked for the URLs to be redirected using 301 to the new URLs which did not have this structure. However, the web developer didn't agree and decided to just rename the "home" folder "p". I don't know why he did this. We argued the case and he then created the URL structure we wanted. Initially he had 301 redirected the old URLS (the one with "Home") to his new version (the one with the "p"). When we asked for the more simplified URL after arguing, he just redirected all the "p" URLS to the PAGE NOT FOUND. However, remember, all the original URLs are now being redirected to the PAGE NOT FOUND as a result. The problems I see are these unless he redirects again: The new simplified URLS have to start from scratch to rank 2)We have duplicated content - two URLs with the same content Customers clicking products in the SERPs will currently find that they are being redirect to the 404 page. I understand that redirection has to occur but my questions are these: Is it ok to redirect twice with 301 - so old URL to the "p" version then to final simplified version. Will link juice be lost doing this twice? If he redirects from the original URLS to the final version missing out the "p" version, what should happen to the "p" version - they are currently indexed. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
WebMaster Tools keeps showing old 404 error but doesn't show a "Linked From" url. Why is that?
Hello Moz Community. I have a question about 404 crawl errors in WebmasterTools, a while ago we had an internal linking problem regarding some links formed in a wrong way (a loop was making links on the fly), this error was identified and fixed back then but before it was fixed google got to index lots of those malformed pages. Recently we see in our WebMaster account that some of this links still appearing as 404 but we currently don't have that issue or any internal link pointing to any of those URLs and what confuses us even more is that WebMaster doesn't show anything in the "Linked From" tab where it usually does for this type of errors, so we are wondering what this means, could be that they still in google's cache or memory? we are not really sure. If anyone has an idea of what this errors showing up now means we would really appreciate the help. Thanks. jZVh7zt.png
Technical SEO | | revimedia1 -
Landing Page URL Structure
We are finally setting up landing pages to support our PPC campaigns. There has been some debate internally about the URL structure. Originally we were planning on URL's like: domain.com /california /florida /ny I would prefer to have the URL's for each state inside a "state" folder like: domain.com /state /california /florida /ny I like having the folders and pages for each state under a parent folder to keep the root folder as clean as possible. Having a folder or file for each state in the root will be very messy. Before you scream URL rewriting :-). Our current site is still running under Classic ASP which doesn't support URL rewriting. We have tried to use HeliconTech's ISAPI rewrite module for IIS but had to remove it because of too many configuration issues. Next year when our coding to MVC is complete we will use URL rewriting. So the question for now: Is there any advantage or disadvantage to one URL structure over the other?
Technical SEO | | briankb0 -
301 an old URL with a ? in the URL?
I am redoing a site and the URL's are changing structure. The client's site was in magento and in the store they would get two URLs, for example: /store/categoryname/productname and /store/categoryname/productname?SID=dslkajsfdoiu947598whouieht983hg98 Do I have to 301 redirect both of these URL's to their new counterpart? Both go to the same content but magento seemed to add these SIDs into the navigation and Google has both versions in the index.
Technical SEO | | DanDeceuster0 -
404 vs. 200?
Is it better to have an error page return a 404 or 200? If I change it to 200, will I still be able to see reports of 404's and/ or broken links? Is there a valid SEO reason that Google would have for not wanting error pages to return 200? In other words, is there any SEO reason to absolutely change it to return a 404? I would rather let it return 200 if no priority reason to change. [title edited by staff to provide clarity]
Technical SEO | | cindyt-170380