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 -
New my domain.com/blog option vs. my blog.mydomain.com option
Our e-commerce site has been on Big Commerce for about a year now. One thing many SEO folks had told us is that having a blog located at /blog was going to help more than a subdomain blog. option. BC has never had the option to have a blog hosted on their platform (/blog) until now. I am now wondering, since we have lost traffic in the past and are trying everything we can to regain it, if we should purchase the Wordpress Site Redirect upgrade and move the subdomain blog (blog.) to the new site option /blog. Any help or feedback from you is very much appreciated. I have attached a screenshot of our main website vs. our blog from Open Site Explorer in case it helps anything. I29Tw5P
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | josh3300 -
What is the best way to rank well in two countries simultaneously with only one CCTLD
I have a .co.nz website and would like to rank on .com.au without setting up a new country specific website for .com.au. What is the best way to do this ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveK640 -
Is my Company Blog Causing issues?
We have a company blog. IE companydomain.com/blog/. Much of the content is unrelated to what we do. So why do we do it? Cover local topics that our customers may be interested in and searching for. Get them in the back door so to speak. Link bait, social sharing etc Develop a marketing culture that's engaged always learning. Customers get to know the people behind the company. Here's my Pickle If i sub domain or separate the site entirely, i won't benefit from all the juice we're generating. If i keep the status quo, since much of the content isn't directly related to my "category", logic tells me that i could be diluting my website in Googles prying eyes. Feedback PLEASE.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | schmeetz0 -
Best way to transfer pagerank from one site to another
We currently own two sites (with unique domains) that accomplish a similar goal, but are completely different (so there's no duplicate content, etc) and were developed independently. Both sites have very good pagerank due to great press and inbound links over several years. Also both have thousands of pages and get a lot of inbound deep links. We plan on shutting one of the sites down so we can focus on the other. We'd like to transfer as much traffic and SEO/pagerank value from the one we're shutting down to the one we're continuing to focus on. What's the best way to do that? Should we just do a 301 redirect? Or keep the site running in some diminished form and link it to the site we're focusing on? I saw SEOmoz has a good guide on moving sites http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection which recommends a 301 redirect, but I wanted to see if the same applies when merging sites as we are in this case.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 212areacode0 -
Blog content - what to do, and what to avoid in terms of links, when you're paying for blog content
Hi, I've just been looking at a restaurant site which is paying food writers to put food news and blogs on their website. I checked the backlink profile of the site and the various bloggers in question usually link from their blogs / company websites to the said restaurant to help promote any new blogs that appear on the restaurant site. That got me wondering about whether this might cause problems with Google. I guess they've been putting about one blog live per month for 2 years, from 12/13 bloggers who have been linking to their website. What would you advise?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
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 -
What is the best tool to crawl a site with millions of pages?
I want to crawl a site that has so many pages that Xenu and Screaming Frog keep crashing at some point after 200,000 pages. What tools will allow me to crawl a site with millions of pages without crashing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iCrossing_UK0