Removing Content 301 vs 410 question
-
Hello,
I was hoping to get the SEOmoz community’s advice on how to remove content most effectively from a large website.
I just read a very thought-provoking thread in which Dr. Pete and Kerry22 answered a question about how to cut content in order to recover from Panda. (http://www.seomoz.org/q/panda-recovery-what-is-the-best-way-to-shrink-your-index-and-make-google-aware).
Kerry22 mentioned a process in which 410s would be totally visible to googlebot so that it would easily recognize the removal of content. The conversation implied that it is not just important to remove the content, but also to give google the ability to recrawl that content to indeed confirm the content was removed (as opposed to just recrawling the site and not finding the content anywhere).
This really made lots of sense to me and also struck a personal chord… Our website was hit by a later Panda refresh back in March 2012, and ever since then we have been aggressive about cutting content and doing what we can to improve user experience.
When we cut pages, though, we used a different approach, doing all of the below steps:
1. We cut the pages
2. We set up permanent 301 redirects for all of them immediately.
3. And at the same time, we would always remove from our site all links pointing to these pages (to make sure users didn’t stumble upon the removed pages.When we cut the content pages, we would either delete them or unpublish them, causing them to 404 or 401, but this is probably a moot point since we gave them 301 redirects every time anyway. We thought we could signal to Google that we removed the content while avoiding generating lots of errors that way…
I see that this is basically the exact opposite of Dr. Pete's advice and opposite what Kerry22 used in order to get a recovery, and meanwhile here we are still trying to help our site recover. We've been feeling that our site should no longer be under the shadow of Panda.
So here is what I'm wondering, and I'd be very appreciative of advice or answers for the following questions:
1. Is it possible that Google still thinks we have this content on our site, and we continue to suffer from Panda because of this?
Could there be a residual taint caused by the way we removed it, or is it all water under the bridge at this point because Google would have figured out we removed it (albeit not in a preferred way)?2. If there’s a possibility our former cutting process has caused lasting issues and affected how Google sees us, what can we do now (if anything) to correct the damage we did?
Thank you in advance for your help,
Eric -
Thanks Dr Peter! I agree with you! Just wanted to feel shure about it.
Yes, Gary, you can personalize also a 410 page.
-
You should be able to customize a 410 just like you do a 404. The problem is that most platforms don't do that, by default, so you get the old-school status code page. That should be configurable, though, on almost all modern platforms.
-
From a commerce perspective the biggest problem I have with the 410 is the user experience. If I tag a URL with a 410 when someone request the page they get a white page that says GONE. They never even get the chance to see the store and maybe search for a similar product.
Would it work if I built a landing page that returns a 410 and then used the 301 to redirect the bad URL to the landing page? It would make the customer happy, they would be in the store with a message to search for something else. But would Google really associate the 410 with the redirected URL?
-
Hi Sandra, don't worry about 404s volume because they won't hurt your rankings.
About your issue I understand that you want to be really clear with your users and don't hurt their experience on the site. So create a custom 404 which changes its content depending of what page is returning it. If it's one of your old product you can return a message or an article of why you decided to remove them and propose some alternatives. For all other errors you can just return a search box or related products to the one you lost.
301 IMHO are not the way to go, if an url is gone it has not being redirected anywhere, so a 301 will result in a bad UX 99% of the time.
-
Hello,
I have a related question about 301 vs 410.
I have a client who wants to delete a whole category of product from one site. It's a big amount of product, so a big amount of urls, but this product is not working very well. So the decision is not SEO-related but more as a business decision. It's not for Panda.
If we think about the communication with the user, the best option would be to have a landing page explaining that we decided to remove that product.
Then the question is, do we do a redirect 301 of all those urls to this landing page? I am afraid that a big redirect like this, going from many urls to a single one (even if this is not created to rank on google) can be seen dodgy by Google. Am I right?
Or do I do a 410 for those pages, and I personalize the 410 landing only for these urls in order to communicate with the user (is that even possible?). But I am afraid, because we'll have much 4XX Errors in WMT, and this may have influence to the rankings!
So I don't know what to do! It's a must that we delete this content and that we communicate it well with the users.
Thanks for your help,
-
100% agreed - 403 isn't really an appropriate alternative to 404. I know SEOs who claim that 410s are stronger/faster, but I haven't seen great evidence in the past couple of years. It's harmless to try 410s, but I wouldn't expect miracles.
-
Hi Eric, I'll try to answer your further question even if I'm not an oracle like Pete
First of all thanks Pete to underline that you need to give google just one response since you can't give them both 301 and 404, I was assuming that and I didn't focus on that part of Eric's answer.
Second. Eric, If your purpose is to give google the ability of recrawl the old content to let them see it has disappeared you want to give them a 404 or a 410 which are respectively not found and permanently not found. Before it was a difference but now they've almost the same value under google's eyes (further reading). In that way google can access your page and see that those contents are now gone.
In the case of 403 the access is denied to anyone both google and humans, so in that case google won't be able to access and recrawl it. If your theory is based (and I think you're in the good way) upon the thing that google needs to recrawl your content and see it ahs really gone, 403 is not the response you should give it.
-
Hey there mememax - thank you for the reply! Reading your post and thinking back to our methodology, yes I think in hindsight we were a bit too afraid about generating errors when we removed content - we should have considered the underlying meaning of the different statuses more carefully. I appreciate your advice.
Eric
-
Hello Dr. Pete – thank you for the great info and advice!
I do have one follow-up question if that's ok – as we move forward cutting undesirable content and generate 4xx status for those pages, is there a difference in impact/effectiveness between a 403 and a 404? We use a CMS and un-publishing a page creates a 403 “Access denied” message. Deleting a page will generate a 404. I would love to hear your opinion about any practical differences from a Googlebot standpoint… does a 404 carry more weight when it comes to content removal, or are they the same to Googlebot? If there’s a difference and the 404 is better, we’ll go the 404 route moving forward.
Thanks again for all your help,
Eric
-
Let me jump in and clarify one small detail. If you delete a page, which would naturally result in a 404, but then 301-redirect that page/URL, there is no 404. I understand the confusion, but ultimately you can only have one HTTP status code. So, if the page properly 301s, it will never return a 404, even if it's technically deleted.
If the page 301s to a page that looks like a "not found" sort of page (content-wise), Google could consider that a "soft 404". Typically, though, once the 301 is in place, the 404 is moot.
For any change in status, the removal of crawl paths could slow Google re-processing those pages. Even if you delete a page, Google has to re-crawl it to see the 404. Now, if it's a high-authority page or has inbound (external) links, it could get re-crawled even if you cut the internal links. If it's a deep, low-value page, though, it may take Google a long time to get back and see those new signals. So, sometimes we recommend keeping the paths open.
There are other ways to kick Google to re-crawl, such as having an XML sitemap open with those pages in them (but removing the internal links). These signals aren't as powerful, but they can help the process along.
As to your specific questions:
(1) It's very tricky, in practice, especially at large-scale. I think step 1 is to dig into your index/cache (slice and dice with the site: operator) and see if Google has removed these pages. There are cases where massive 301s, etc. can look fishy to Google, but usually, once a page is gone, it's gone. If Google has redirected/removed these pages, and you're still penalized, then you may be fixing the wrong problem or possibly haven't gone far enough.
(2) It really depends on the issue. If you cut too deep and somehow cut off crawl paths or stranded inbound links, then you may need to re-establish some links/pages. If you 301'ed a lot of low-value content (and possibly bad links), you may actually need to cut some of those 301s and let those pages die off. I agree with @mememax that sometimes a helathy combination of 301s/404s is a better bet - pages go away, and 404s are normal if there's really no good alternative to the page that's gone.
-
Hi Eric, in my experience I've always found 4** better than 301 to solve this kind of issues.
Many people uses this response too much just because they want to show google that their site don't have any 404.
Just think about it a little, a 301 is a permanent redirect, a content which has just moved from one place to another. If you got a content you want to get rid of, do you want to give google the message "hey that low quality content is not where you found it but now it's here", no. You wan't to give google the message that the low quality content has been improved or removed. And a 404 is the right message to give him if you deleted that content.
It's prefectly normal to have 404s in a website, many 404 won't hurt your rankings, only if those pages were ranking already so users will receive a 404 instead and if some external sites were linking there in that case you may consider a 301.
While I think that google has a sort of a black list (and a white list too) I don't think that it has a memory of bad sites he encounters, if you fix your issues you'll start to rank again.
The issue you may have is not that you're site may be tainted but that maybe you still have some issues here and there which you didn't fix. As it seems Googlers said that Panda is now part of the algo so if you fix your issues you won't need any upgrade to start re ranking.
Hope this may have helped!! G luck!
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
-
Temporary Blog Removal Process Question
Hello, We need to temporarily remove our entire blog from one of our sites. They rely very heavily on the blog content; as the rest of the site does not have much. Is there a 'best' process for going about this? – Should we put a 302 redirect on the entire blog and if so should it be to the homepage or an under-construction type page? Any extra insight or suggestions would be helpful and appreciated. Looking forward to hearing from you! Thank you in advance for the help. Best,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ben-R0 -
Crawl Test Question
Good Morning, I am just looking for a little bit of advice, I ran a crawl report on our website www.swiftcomm.co.uk. I have resolved most of the issues myself, however I have two questions;- Screenshot image http://imgur.com/VlFEiZ2 Highlighted blue, we have two homepages www.swiftcomm.co.uk and www.swiftcomm.co.uk/ both are set with a Rel-Canonical Target of www.swiftcomm.co.uk/. Will this cause me any SEO issues and or other potential issue? If this may cause an issue how would I go about resolving? Highlighted yellow, Our contact and referral-form are showing as duplicate title and meta description. Both of these pages have separate title and meta desc which it does seem to be detecting. If I search the page in google it returns the correct title and meta desc. The only common denominator behind these pages is that both have php pages behind them for the contact form. Do you think that the moz crawl may be detecting the php page over the html? Could this be cause any issues when search engines crawl the site? Kind Regards Jonathan Mack VlFEiZ2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JMack9860 -
Content Cannibalism Question with example
Hi, Since I love writing and I write a lot I always find myself worried about ruining for my self with Content Cannibalism. Yesterday, while looking to learn about diamonds I encountered a highly ranked website that has two pages ranking high on the first page simultaneously (4th and 5th) - I never noticed it before with Google. The term I googled was "vvs diamonds" and the two pages were: http://bit.ly/1N51HpQ and http://bit.ly/1JefWYS Two questions: 1. Does that happen often with Google (presenting two lines from the same site on first page)? 2. Would it be better practice for the writer to combine them? - creating a one more powerful page... Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet1 -
4 websites with same content?
I have 4 websites (1 Main, 3 duplicate) with same content. Now I want to change the content for duplicate websites and main website will remain the same content. Is there any problem with my thinking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marknorman0 -
Htaccess 301 regex question
I need some help with a regex for htaccess. I want to 301 redirect this: http://olddomain.com/oldsubdir/fruit.aspx to this: https://www.newdomain.com/newsubdir/FRUIT changes: different protocol (http -> https) add 'www.' different domain (olddomain and newdomain are constants) different subdirectory (oldsubdir and newsubdir are constants) 'fruit' is a variable (which will contain only letters [a-zA-Z]) is it possible to make 'fruit' UPPER case on the redirect (so 'fruit' -> 'FRUIT') remove '.aspx' I think it's something like this (placed in the .htaccess file in the root directory of olddomain): RedirectMatch 301 /oldsubdir/(.*).aspx https://www.newdomain.com/newsubdir/$1 Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | scanlin0 -
Last Panda: removed a lot of duplicated content but no still luck!
Hello here, my website virtualsheetmusic.com has been hit several times by Panda since its inception back in February 2011, and so we decided 5 weeks ago to get rid of about 60,000 thin, almost duplicate pages via noindex metatags and canonical (we have no removed physically those pages from our site giving back a 404 because our users may search for those items on our own website), so we expected this last Panda update (#25) to give us some traffic back... instead we lost an additional 10-12% traffic from Google and now it looks even really badly targeted. Let me say how disappointing is this after so much work! I must admit that we still have many pages that may look thin and duplicate content and we are considering to remove those too (but those are actually giving us sales from Google!), but I expected from this last Panda to recover a little bit and improve our positions on the index. Instead nothing, we have been hit again, and badly. I am pretty desperate, and I am afraid to have lost the compass here. I am particularly afraid that the removal of over 60,000 pages via noindex metatags from the index, for some unknown reason, has been more damaging than beneficial. What do you think? Is it just a matter of time? Am I on the right path? Do we need to wait just a little bit more and keep removing (via noindex metatags) duplicate content and improve all the rest as usual? Thank you in advance for any thoughts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Help With Preferred Domain Settings, 301 and Duplicate Content
I've seen some good threads developed on this topic in the Q&A archives, but feel this topic deserves a fresh perspective as many of the discussion were almost 4 years old. My webmaster tools preferred domain setting is currently non www. I didn't set the preferred domain this way, it was like this when I first started using WM tools. However, I have built the majority of my links with the www, which I've always viewed as part of the web address. When I put my site into an SEO Moz campaign it recognized the www version as a subdomain which I thought was strange, but now I realize it's due to the www vs. non www preferred domain distinction. A look at site:mysite.com shows that Google is indexing both the www and non www version of the site. My site appears healthy in terms of traffic, but my sense is that a few technical SEO items are holding me back from a breakthrough. QUESTION to the SEOmoz community: What the hell should I do? Change the preferred domain settings? 301 redirect from non www domain to the www domain? Google suggests this: "Once you've set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer." Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC1 -
Crawl questions
My first website crawl indicating many issues. I corrected the issues, requested another crawl and received the results. After viewing the excel file I have some questions. 1. There are many pages with missing Titles and Meta Descriptions in the Excel file. An example is http://www.terapvp.com/threads/help-us-decide-on-terapvp-com-logo.25/page-2 That page clearly has a meta description and title. It is a forum thread. My forum software does a solid job of always providing those tags. Why would my crawl report not show this information? This occurs on numerous pages. 2. I believe all my canonical URLs are properly set. My crawl report has 3k+ records, largely due to there being 10 records for many pages. These extra records are various sort orders and style differences for the same page i.e. ?direction=asc. My need for a crawl report is to provide actionable data so I can easily make SEO improvements to my site where necessary. These extra records don't provide any benefit. IF the crawl report determined there was not a clear canonical URL, then I could understand. But that is not the case. An example is http://www.terapvp.com/forums/news/ If you look at the source you will clearly see Where is the benefit to including the 10 other records in the Crawl report which show this same page in various sort orders? Am I missing anything? 3. My robots.txt appropriately blocks many pages that I do not wish to be crawled. What is the benefit to including these many pages in the crawl report? Perhaps I am over analyzing this report. I have read many articles on SEO, but now that I have found SEOmoz, I can see I will need to "unlearn what I have learned". Many things such as setting meta keyword tags are clearly not helpful. I wish to focus my energy and I was looking to the crawl report as my starting point. Either I am missing something, or the report design needs improvement.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanKent0