Best way to fix 404 crawl errors caused by Private blog posts in WordPress?
-
Going over Moz Crawl error report and WMT's Crawl errors for a new client site... I found 44 High Priority Crawl Errors = 404 Not Found
I found that those 44 blog pages were set to Private Mode (WordPress theme), causing the 404 issue.
I was reviewing the blog content for those 44 pages to see why those 2010 blog posts, were set to private mode. Well, I noticed that all those 44 blog posts were pretty much copied from other external blog posts. So i'm thinking previous agency placed those pages under private mode, to avoid getting hit for duplicate content issues. All other blog posts posted after 2011 looked like unique content, non scraped.So my question to all is: What is the best way to fix the issue caused by these 44 pages?
A. Remove those 44 blog posts that used verbatim scraped content from other external blogs.
B. Update the content on each of those 44 blog posts, then set to Public mode, instead of Private.
C. ? (open to recommendations)I didn't find any external links pointing to any of those 44 blog pages, so I was considering in removing those blog posts. However not sure if that will affect site in anyway.
Open to recommendations before making a decision...
Thanks -
Hey Alberto,
If those 44 posts are set to "private" how is Moz finding them? Somewhere in your blog you are linking to them. Find those links and take them down.
Then you should consider 2 things:
- Do those pages get any organic traffic? If yes, try to create a page that isn't a copy, with unique and useful content and set it as public.
- If there's no organic traffic, then just leave the 404 and just make sure your 404 is a nicely designed 404 that offers some value to the user. Not only for these 44 pages, but to cover any 404 issue in the future too. You could, for example, check the URL requested and search our site for related content and while saying that the page they were looking for is missing/removed, you suggest looking those other pages.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Best way to set up URL structure for reviews off of PDP pages.
We are adding existing customer reviews to Product Detail Pages pages. There are about 300 reviews per product so we're going to have to paginate reviews off of the PDP page. I'm wondering what the best url structure for reviews pages is to get the most seo benefit. For example, would it be something like this? site.com/category/product/reviews/page-1 or something that used parameters, such as: site.com/reviews?product=a Also, what is the best way to show that the internal link on the PDP page to "All Reviews" is a higher priority link than the other links on the page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | katseo10 -
Download all GSC crawl errors: Possible today?
Hey guys: I tried to download all the crawl data from Google Search Console using the API and solutions like this one: https://github.com/eyecatchup/php-webmaster-tools-downloads but seems that is not longer working (or I made something wrong, I just receive a blank page when running the PHP file after some load time)... I needed to download more than 1.000 URLs long time ago, so I didn't tried to use this method since then. Is there any other solution using the API to grab all the crawl errors, or today this is not possible anymore? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | antonioaraya1 -
Guest Blog post best practice considering time/energy
Good morning Moz community 🙂 What do you guys think would be the best practice as a starting blogger offering guest articles to other 3rd party blogs when it comes to building up my own website's SEO points (assuming I have a link in the guest article to my website). 1. If I have the opportunity to post the guest article on two+ different blogs, should I go for it? -OR- 2. Only post the article on one specific blog and write a different one for the others? In a world with unlimited resources, the latter option would prevail, but considering that it takes time to write, what would you recommend if I am trying to build my websites SERPs? Carlos
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 90miLLA0 -
Best way to start a fresh site from a penalized one
Dear all, I was dealing with a penalized domain (Penguin, Panda), hundred of spamy links (Disavoved with no success), tiny content resolved in part and so on .... I think the best way is to start a new fresh domain but we want to use some of the well written content from the old (penalized site). To do this task I will mark as NOINDEX the source (penalized) page and move this content to the new fresh domain. Question: do you think this is a non-dangerous aprouch or do you know other strategy? I'll appreciate your point of view Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharewarePros0 -
Sidewide footer links to latest blog posts
Dear Friends I hope you can answer my questions. We are launching a new site and on the footer (sidewide) we list all new blog posts (limit 5 links - blog title), do you think we have any problems with that part of the website? I am concerned because all new blog post title will appear on all pages' footer and it will be marked as spammed. We just want visitors to be noticed about new blogs post on our site. Thank you,Tran
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveTran20130 -
Using AggregateReview markup to generate star sinppets for wordpress blog posts? OK or Spam?
Do you believe using a plugin that allows visitors to rate your blog posts and then generating AggregateReview markup code for each blog post is in accordance with google guidelines? I saw there are a couple of wordpress plugins that offer this functionality. Anybody who had any negative experience? Star icons will certainly increase visibility in SERP.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Best way to set up anchor text on parked pages?
Our company is no longer offering a series of products, much to the disappointment of our SEO team since we've spent a long time building up the pages and getting them ranked organically. The pages all have decent page rank and in some cases rank #1 for the primary keyword. We have a sister company that we acquired a year ago and they still offer these products on their website. They are a completely separate company with their own website which existed long before we acquired them and we have nothing to do with their website. Our team has proposed that rather than take down the URLs on our site for the products we no longer offer, to put a message saying something like "sorry we don't offer this anymore but you may be interested in this.." and then link to our sister company with anchor text so that they can get some benefit from our SEO efforts if we can't. The question/issue is how should we do that since there will be a lot of pages from the same domain, about 20 pages, all linking to a few pages on a different domain. Should the anchor text be varied unbranded or branded? On the one hand I think if we change up the anchor text used to link to another page many times from a single domain that looks strange and transparent to google. On the other hand unbranded text would be the better descriptor for users since we are deep linking to the product not the homepage of the other site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edu-SEO0 -
Best free way to make our NAPs consistent - online software maybe?
Hello, What's the best free tool or method to making our local SEO citations consistent? We have more than one name and phone number out there and there are a lot of citations already.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0