Google says 404s don't cause ranking drops, but what about a lot of them
-
Hello,
According to Google here, 404s don't cause rankings to go down. Our rankings are going down and we have about 50 or so 404s (though some may have been deindexed by now). We have about 300 main products and 9000 pages in general on this Ecommerce site.
There's no link equity gained by 301 redirecting the 404s. A custom 404 page has been made linking to the home page. There's nothing linking to the pages that are 404s
Provided that no more 404s are created, can I just ignore them and find the real reason our rankings are going down?
-
Hi Dana,
Thank you. I thought of that too but these pages aren't linked to anywhere in the site anymore so am I correct that screaming frog won't find them?
-
Hi Bob,
I use Screaming Frog for this. If you don't already have it, it's $99 very well spent. Once your site is crawled it's very easy to pull the 404s into an Excel spreadsheet and deal with them from there.
Hope that helps!
Dana
-
What's the best way to find the 404s in 9000 pages if they don't show up in GWT?
-
I highly agree to stewart’s statement that 404 might not affect rankings but lot of 404 will create a high bounce rate and this defiantly will increase the bounce rate which can cause the ranking drop.
When I work with clients, one of the first jobs I do is to reduce the 404’s number to minimum. It is not necessary to take it to zero but reduce it as much as you can!
-
I agree with Stewart, but it's also a tricky thing. Are you 100% positive there are no rogue links out in the www linking to any of these sites? Have you reviewed your site map are they hanging out in there? Could there be a 301 somewhere pointing to it? Not so much bounce rate I would be concerned about but usability - which is something that Google is taking a look at.
-
Per se they don't but a high bounce rate will harm your site - no one knows the extent of this but an adverse bounce rate makes up a part of the quality ranking signals (more than 200) Google uses to evaluate a site in the serps.
Therefore having several 404's can effect a bounce rate figure negatively and ultimately harm a site to a lesser or greater degree.
However, 50 I don't think is high relative to the numbers of visitors that navigate to a second page which is a postive metric - if that is the case for you I wouldn't worry. But 50 404's on a website with 200 pages is bad.
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
-
Key word Ranking are going down
Hi, my website's Keywords Ranking are going down, I am very new to SEO, I don't know what's the reason please help me out....my website is www.tourspackagedubai.com. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tariqsalam0 -
Spamming Backlinks - doesn't seem to be detrimental enough?
Hi, We have noticed sites such as http://www.rattanfurnitureoutlet.co.uk & http://www.supremerattanfurniture.co.uk/ have huge numbers of what appear to be spam like and invaluable backlinks yet they have both maintained a great ranking for their search terms despite this. We would like to know why, does the good outweigh the bad so to speak?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | birdmarketing0 -
Negative SEO from Spammers Killing Client Rankings
Hi - I have identified a client website which was; a ) hacked and had several fraudulent pages added e.g. www.xxx.com/images/uggaustralia.html added which have 301 redirect links to another fraudulent websites. b) had an auto generated back link campaign (over 12k back links at present) with targeted anchor text at cheap ugg boots, ugg sale etc. I've removed the dodgy redirect web pages and also undertook a link audit using Google WMT, OSE and Seo Majestic and have disavowed all the spammy links at domain level. Consequently my client has dropped from top three for the key phrase to #9. Google WMT now sees ugg boots uk, ugg boots sale etc. as some of the most popular anchor text for the site even though it's blatantly obvious that the site has nothing to do with Ugg boots. No manual webspam penalties are in place however the auto generated anchor text campaign is still ongoing and is generating more spammy links back to non existent web pages - which still Google appears to be picking up. Question is - how long do you reckon it will take for the links to disappear and is there anything I can speed Google along as this issue if not of my making? p.s. For the record I've found at least 500 sites that have been targeted by this same campaign as well.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Door4seo0 -
I am experiencing referrer spam from http://r-e-f-e-r-e-r.com/ (don't click) - What should I do?
It amazes me that every day in search marketing is filled with something new that I don't know or never heard of. Most of you are probably familiar with referrer spam, but I hadn't ever heard of it before. I am currently experiencing referral spam on my personal blog. What's the best way to get rid of this pest? Shall I ignore them? Block them in my robots.txt file? Use Google's Disavow? or should I just plain holler "Curse you referral spam people!!!" ? Thanks all!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Does the proximity to the center of the city have anything to do with higher rankings in local results ?
Does the proximity to the center of the city have anything to do with higher rankings in local results ?? If yes then how ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mnkpso0 -
Has anyone ever reported a spammer and actually seen them de-ranked?
I have a few competitors outranking me using black hat SEO. I reported them to Google, and I'm just wondering if Google will even look at it. What has been your experience with this? Has anyone ever gotten results?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | UnderRugSwept1 -
Google turned me down, don't know why...
Hello, I'm experiencing decreasing on some of my keywords. I'm aware of some things which could be responsible for it. So I'd like to asi you, if my thoughts are right, and what to do with it. 1. I put backlinks leading onto my website. Those backlinks are on website I also own (they are on the same server). But nothing happened. Than I put other backlikns on this webiste. Those links also led to webistes I own. So could Google "punnished" those websites I'm linking to? 2. I offered my content to another website, which has a higher authority. This content had been published on my website weeks ago, I put it on this (another site). Co could Google punnished me for "duplicate" content? 3. In the past, we outsorced our SEO, and the company which was responsible for our SEO put backlinks leading to our website almost everywhere, I mean, those websites, they put links leading to our webistes fos focused on almost everything but our field (finance). But everything seemed to be fine, till now 4. Couple of days ago, I put our RSS on many RSS agregators and put our webiste on many catalogs. My website URL is www.penizenavic.cz Could you help me out? 🙂 Thanks a lot Petr
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | petr.rozkosny0 -
How is this obvious black hat technique working in Google?
Get ready to have your minds blown. Try a search in Google for any of these: proform tour de france tour de france trainer tour de france exercise bike proform tour de france bike In each instance you will notice that Proform.com, the maker of the bike, is not #1. In fact, the same guy is #1 every time, and this is the URL: www.indoorcycleinstructor.com/tour-de-france-indoor-cycling-bike Here's the fun part. Click on that result and guess where you go? Yup, Proform.com. The exact same page ranking right behind it in fact. Actually, this URL first redirects to an affiliate link and that affiliate link redirects to Proform.com. I want to know two things. First, how on earth did they do this? They got to #1 ahead of Proform's own page. How was it done? But the second question is, how have they not been caught? Are they cloaking? How does Google rank a double 301 redirect in the top spot whose end destination is the #2 result? PS- I have a site in this industry and this is how I caught it and why it is of particular interest. Just can't figure out how it was done or why they have not been caught. Not because I plan to copy them, but because I plan to report them to Google but want to have some ammo.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DanDeceuster0