Hundreds of 404 Pages, What Should I do?
-
Hi,
My client just had there website redeveloped within wordpress. I just ran a crawl errors test for their website using Google Webmasters. I discovered that the client has about six hundred, 404 pages. Most of the error pages originated from their previous image gallery.
I already have a custom 404 page set-up, but is there something else I should be doing? Is it worth while to 301 redirect every single page within the .htaccess file, or will Google filter these pages out of its index naturally?
Thanks Mozers!
-
HTML / CSS. I just found a way to change this setting in my server host (GoDaddy), so it looks like that's all I have to do. It doesn't appear that I would need to change anything in my htaccess file.
I take the following statement from Google as meaning we should only use the default 404 setting and not direct it to the homepage? "Another example is when a site redirects any unknown URLs to their homepage instead of returning 404s. Both of these cases can have negative effects.............." I guess I'm a little thrown off by the word "any urls."
-
Are you using a content management system like wordpress or joomla? Or is it a straight HTML / CSS website?
-
I have the same problem. I don't see any information in the Google link about setting up a proper 404 page. Can someone advise how to do this or where to find info on this?
-
Exactly what I was about to say. Cutts knows all.
-
Daniel you rock! This is EXACTLY what I was looking for.
Thanks again.
-
The Google webmaster blog answered this perfectly the other day, here is their post:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html
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
-
Soft 404 error
Hello friends
Technical SEO | | industriestaedt
This is my site
https://www.alihosseini.org/ In the search console I have a soft 404 error
How can I fix this error?
I use WordPress0 -
Why are crawlers not picking up these pages?
Hi there, I've been asked to audit a new subdomain for a travel company. It's all a bit messy, so it's going to take some time to remedy. However, one thing I couldn't understand was the low number of pages appearing in certain crawlers. The subdomain has many pages. A homepage, category pages then product pages. Unfortunately, tools like Screaming Frog and xml-sitemaps.com are only picking up 19 pages and I can't figure out why. Google has so far indexed around 90 pages - this is by no means all of them, but that's probably because of the new domain and lack of sitemap etc. After looking at the crawl results, only the homepage and category (continent pages) are showing. So all the product pages are not. for example, tours.statravel.co.uk/trip/Amsterdam_Kings_Day_(Start_London_end_London)-COCCKDM11 is not appearing in the crawl results. After reviewing the source code, I can't see anything that would prevent this page being crawled. Am I missing something? At the moment, the crawl should be picking up around 400+ product pages, but it's not picking up any. Thanks
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as duplicate pages and duplicate page titles can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what might I be missing?
I am getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as reporting both duplicate pages and duplicate page titles on crawl results, I can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what am I be missing? Has anyone else had a similar issue, how was it corrected?
Technical SEO | | tgwebmaster0 -
Advice on whether we 301 redirect a page or update existing page?
Hi guys, any advice would be really appreciated. We have an existing page that ranks well for 'red widgets'. The page isn't monetised right now, but we're bringing in a new product onto our site that we optimised for 'blue widgets'. Unfortunately, not enough research was done for this page and we've now realised that consumers actually search for 'red widgets' when looking for the product we're creating as 'blue widgets'. The problem with this is that the 'red widgets' page is in a completely different category of our site than what it needs to be (it needs to be with 'blue widgets'). So, my question is; Should we do a 301 redirect from our 'red-widgets' page to our 'blue-widgets' page which we want to update and optimise the content on there for 'red-widgets'. Or, should we update the existing red-widgets page to have the right products and content on there, even thought it is in the wrong place of our site and users could get confused as to why they are there. If we do a 301 redirect to our new page, will we lose our rankings and have to start again, or is there a better way around this? Thanks! Dave
Technical SEO | | davo230 -
From page 1th to page 18th @ Google
Hello Mozzers! I have a question, you may help.. How may it be possible that a page ranking well (1th result) goes from 1th result to the 18th page just in 1 day? It doesnt seem to be any kind of penalization.. I now had all suspicious outgoing links to be nofollow (they were not before), this may be a cause .. (?) Do you have any other suggestion? Thanks
Technical SEO | | socialengaged0 -
Home page indexed but not ranking...interior pages with thin content outrank home page??
I have a Joomla site with a home page that I can't get to rank for anything beyond the company name @ Google - the site works fine @ Bing and Yahoo. The interior pages will rank all day long but the home page never shows up in the results. I have checked the page code out in every tool that I know about and have had no luck....by all account it should be good to go...any thoughts/comments/help would be greatly appreciated. The site is http://www.selectivedesigns.com Thanks! Greg
Technical SEO | | DougHosmer0 -
I have custom 404 page and getting so much 404 error on Google webmaster, what should i do?
I have a custom 404 page with popular post and category links in the page, everyday i have 404 crawl error on webmaster tools, what should i do?
Technical SEO | | rimon56930 -
Does page speed affect what pages are in the index?
We have around 1.3m total pages, Google currently crawls on average 87k a day and our average page load is 1.7 seconds. Out of those 1.3m pages(1.2m being "spun up") google has only indexed around 368k and our SEO person is telling us that if we speed up the pages they will crawl the pages more and thus will index more of them. I personally don't believe this. At 87k pages a day Google has crawled our entire site in 2 weeks so they should have all of our pages in their DB by now and I think they are not index because they are poorly generated pages and it has nothing to do with the speed of the pages. Am I correct? Would speeding up the pages make Google crawl them faster and thus get more pages indexed?
Technical SEO | | upper2bits0