What are the best ways to fix 404 errors?

[webestate]

I recently changed the url of my main blog and now have about 100 404 errors.  I did a redirect from the old url to the new one however still have errors.

1.  Should I do a 301 redirect from each old blog post url to the new blog post url?

2.  Should I just delete the old blog post (url) and rewrite the blog post?

I"m not concerned about links to the old posts as a lot of them do not have many links.

[webestate]

Thanks Andy.  I made this change........domain.com/blue-blog to domain.com/blog using a rewriterule.  It seemed to work.

[webestate]

I did change the structure domain.com/blue-blog to domain.com/blog.  So I did a rewrite rule in the .htaccess file.  That fixed a lot of things however there are still 100 or so 404's.  They are old blog posts and not really that important.

[SEOAndy]

As tom says 404 errors are not the end of the world.

if you are concerned then as long as the relative urls have remained the same and the root directory is all that has changes a 301 in bulk should work, though if you've changed categories or something it may not work so well as a single entity and 100 would be the way to go.

Something that you should do, if you've not already, is within webmaster tools make sure you tell Google you've changed your url (configuration > change address) - it also has a mini guide on the steps you should be taking, including to register your new domain on webmaster tools.

But again, as tom says, if it's not destroying the user experience and isn't a huge annoyance for visitors don't worry too much about it.

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Just for your reference a full url redirect (aka changing say abc.com to abc.net - moving all directories and urls in one go) would look like

RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.abc.net

[Highland]

Are we talking about a structural change (i.e. domain.com/blog to domain.com/myblog) or a TLD change (domain.com to domain2.com)? If you kept the same blog structure otherwise, I would write a .htaccess file to make sure you just blanket redirect all URLs. It's easy to do that way but not everyone has access to that.

I recommend 301s just because they avoid the sloppiness problem. I mean, you wrote the content for people to find, right? If they hit a 404 it just frustrates them. It doesn't matter whether or not you need the SEO, I like it when a 301 takes me where I really need to go. it shows someone cared enough to make sure I could get to what they had done. It's a pride of authorship thing.

[TomRayner]

Hi Nathan

If you're not concerned about passing the links/link equity of the old posts to a new page, or if you don't think there are any users visiting the URL directly, then I would simply leave the page as a 404 error.

404s are a natural part of the course and Google recognises this - check out this webmaster blog post. 100 404s isn't an awful lot, so I wouldn't worry about them unless they're interrupting a user journey (which you'll be able to check in analytics).

If you really want to get rid of them, then a 301 would be the way to go in my opinion. 100 301s will not slow down your .htaccess file by any noticeable margin. But overall, I'd let the 404s be 404s.