Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Are 404 Errors a bad thing?
-
Good Morning...
I am trying to clean up my e-commerce site and i created a lot of new categories for my parts...
I've made the old category pages (which have had their content removed) "hidden" to anyone who visits the site and starts browsing. The only way you could get to those "hidden" pages is either by knowing the URLS that I used to use or if for some reason one of them is spidering in Google.
Since I'm trying to clean up the site and get rid of any duplicate content issues, would i be better served by adding those "hidden" pages that don't have much or any content to the Robots.txt file or should i just De-activate them so now even if you type the old URL you will get a 404 page...
In this case, are 404 pages bad? You're typically not going to find those pages in the SERPS so the only way you'd land on these 404 pages is to know the old url i was using that has been disabled.
Please let me know if you guys think i should be 404'ing them or adding them to Robots.txt
Thanks
-
Hello Prime85,
Both these answers are correct in their own way, but let me clarify and add my 2 cents.
1. 404s don't hurt your rankings directly, but they can provide a poor user experience.
2. If you keep URLs "live" - then Google can keep these URLs in their index indefinitely. This means search engines may waste time and crawling resources visiting pages you don't want in the index, while ignoring your other pages. This CAN hurt your SEO.
Long story short, (like Brian says) if the page is no longer relevant, you should remove it from the index or redirect it to another URL.
3. Returning a 404 kills all link juice that may have gone to the page, and it can also send confusing signals to search engines about the structure of your site if you have a bunch of pages returning 404s at the same time you have a bunch of new, but similar, pages popping into existence.
The best policy is to set up a 301 redirect from your outdated pages to the most relevant new pages. Don't redirect everything to a single page like the homepage, but instead the redirect to the page that would be most relevant and useful for the user.
On the other hand, if it's a low-value page and there's really no need to redirect it, you should remove it from the index. There's a couple ways to do this:
- Put a meta robots "NOINDEX" tag in the head and wait for Google to crawl the page and process the noindex. It helps if the URL is listed in your sitemap so that they can more easily "find" the url.
- Block the URL through robots.txt, then use Google's Remove URL tool in Webmaster tools
- Return a 404, and use the Remove URL tool
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
-
Hi,
Here is what google says about 404s
"Q: Do the 404 errors reported in Webmaster Tools affect my site’s ranking?
A: 404s are a perfectly normal part of the web; the Internet is always changing, new content is born, old content dies, and when it dies it (ideally) returns a 404 HTTP response code. Search engines are aware of this; we have 404 errors on our own sites, as you can see above, and we find them all over the web. In fact, we actually prefer that, when you get rid of a page on your site, you make sure that it returns a proper 404 or 410 response code (rather than a “soft 404”). "" If some URLs on your site 404, this fact alone does not hurt you or count against you in Google’s search results. However, there may be other reasons that you’d want to address certain types of 404s. For example, if some of the pages that 404 are pages you actually care about, you should look into why we’re seeing 404s when we crawl them! If you see a misspelling of a legitimate URL (www.example.com/awsome instead of www.example.com/awesome), it’s likely that someone intended to link to you and simply made a typo. Instead of returning a 404, you could 301 redirect the misspelled URL to the correct URL and capture the intended traffic from that link. You can also make sure that, when users do land on a 404 page on your site, you help them find what they were looking for rather than just saying “404 Not found."
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html
I would recommend you to 301 redirect them to the appropriated page and 404 what you dont find a good page to redirect.
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
-
Sitemap error in Webmaster tools - 409 error (conflict)
Hey guys, I'm getting this weird error when I submit my sitemap to Google. It says I'm getting a 409 error in my post-sitemap.xml file (https://cleargear.com/post-sitemap.xml). But when I check it, it looks totally fine. I am using YoastSEO to generate the sitemap.xml file. Has anyone else experienced this? Is this a big deal? If so, Does anyone know how to fix? Thanks EwTswL4
Technical SEO | | Extima-Christian0 -
Intermittent 404 - What causes them and how to fix?
Hi! I'm working on a client site at the moment and I've discovered a couple of pages that are 404ing but producing a 200 OK response. However, I have checked these URLs again and some are now producing a 404 Error response. No changes have been made (that I'm aware of) so it appears that the URLs are returning both 200 OK and 404 Error responses intermittently. Any ideas what could cause this and the best solution? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | daniel-brooks0 -
Are links in menus to external sites bad for SEO?
We're building a blog on a subdomain of the main site. The main site is on Shopify and the blog will be on wordpress. I'd like to keep the user experience as simple as possible so I'd like to make the blog look exactly like the main Shopify site. This means having a menu in the blog that duplicates the Shopify menu. So is it bad for SEO to have someone click on the 'about us' button in the blog subdomain (blog.mainsite.com) which takes you to the 'about us page' on the main shopify website (mainsite.com)?
Technical SEO | | acs1110 -
404 error - but I can't find any broken links on the referrer pages
Hi, My crawl has diagnosed a client's site with eight 404 errors. In my CSV download of the crawl, I have checked the source code of the 'referrer' pages, but can't find where the link to the 404 error page is. Could there be another reason for getting 404 errors? Thanks for your help. Katharine.
Technical SEO | | PooleyK0 -
500 Server Error on RSS Feed
Hi there, I am getting multiple 500 errors on my RSS feed. Here is the error: <dt>Title</dt> <dd>500 : Error</dd> <dt>Meta Description</dt> <dd>Traceback (most recent call last): File "build/bdist.linux-x86_64/egg/downpour/init.py", line 391, in _error failure.raiseException() File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/twisted/python/failure.py", line 370, in raiseException raise self.type, self.value, self.tb Error: 500 Internal Server Error</dd> <dt>Meta Robots</dt> <dd>Not present/empty</dd> <dt>Meta Refresh</dt> <dd>Not present/empty</dd> Any ideas as to why this is happening, they are valid feeds?
Technical SEO | | mistat20000 -
4XX Errors - Adding %5c%5c to Links
Hi all 😃 Hope someone can help me with this. The internal links on my hubby's business site occasionally break and add %5c%5c%5c endlessly to the end of the url - like this: site.com/about/hours-of-operation/\\\\\\\\% I cannot for the life of me figure out why it is doing this and while it has happened to me from time to time, I can't recreate it. My crawl diagnostics here in my SEOMox campaign show 19-20 urls doing this - it's nuts. Any insight? Thank you!! Jennifer ~PotPieGirl
Technical SEO | | potpiegirl0 -
What should be use 301 or 302 redirection for 404 pages
Please suggest which redirection we should use for 404 pages- 301 or 302. If you can elaborate it with reason then it will be highly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | koamit0 -
Should there be a canonical tag on my 404 error page?
In my crawl diagnostics, I notice some 4xx client errors. They are appearing for pages that no longer exist, so I'm not sure what the problem is. Shouldn't they just be dealt as 404's? Anyway, on closer inspection I noticed that my 404 error page contains a canonical tag which points to the missing page. Could this be the issue? Is it a good idea to remove the canonical tag from this error page? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Leighm0