Is it necessary to redirect every Error page (404 or 500) found?
-
If I have Hundreds of pages with 404 and 500 erros should set up 301 redirects for all of them? Some of the pages have external links, some don't.
-
There are a few reasons this can happen. Each tool crawls the web at different times and see different things. I would recommend at least investigating any issues you find regardless of which tool you used to discover it.
Personally, I would pay good money for a tool from Google which used their algorithms and data, but that isn't an option so we do the best we can with the available tools. Google WMT and SEOmoz crawl reports are two parts of that solution for me.
-
Josh- I'm of the opinion that there is no tool in the wild that is consistently accurate, in any regard, including detection of 404 errors. There are a number of things that can cause one tool to detect an error, while another won't. Personally, I compare the results of all the different tools I use, and hopefully find a consensus. Failing that, I double check with them all, and look for consistent results. If nothing changes, you may just have to "consider the source" and decide in which tool you have greater confidence.
Not much help, I realize, but sometimes that's just the way it is.
-
Thanks-
Some of the errors came from Opensiteexporer, but are not in Google webmaster tools. What do you think about this?
-
500 errors should not happen. I would recommend determining the root issue and resolving it.
404s are a natural part of the internet. There is nothing inherently wrong with your site having some pages that offer 404 errors.
With that said, I recommend taking any pages with value that 404 and 301 them to the most appropriate page on your site. It will allow your link juice to be retained, and offer your users a better experience.
I would also recommend offering a soft 404 error page that offers a site map or other navigation help.
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
-
Ecommerce Category Pages
First, let's define the terminology for the various types of ecommerce pages. The terminology differs from organization to organization: Product Description Pages (PDPs): These pages have a single product, pricing, an "add to cart" button, reviews, and a product description. Product Listing Pages (PLPs): These are product category/subcategory pages that have product image links and text links to Product Description Pages (PDPs). Category Pages: These pages have subcategory image and text links to subcategory pages. No product images are displayed Hybrid Category Pages: these pages combine sub-Category Images and text at the top of the page and product listings below. Our CMS currently does not allow us to create hybrids. This conversation revolves primarily around mobile. Our ecommerce team is having discussions around the appropriate use of PLPs vs Category pages. After doing a quick audit of the mobile sites of some top ecommerce players, there is definitely a trend to use Category Pages at the top of the category and sub-category hierarchy and use PLPs at the very bottom. The logic from a usability perspective is to allow visitors to navigate a site without ever using the hamburger navigation. ex: Baby (Category Page) => Car Seats (Category Page) => Convertible Car Seats (PLP) The sites I audited all had hamburger menus. A visitor would navigate from a home page image for "Baby," an image on the "Baby" page to "Car Seats", and an image on the "Car Seats" page to the Convertible Car Seats page. At that point, they would be able to shop for "Convertible Car Seats" on a PLP. This appears to be excellent UX and easy to use navigation. Theoretically, good for SEO as well. In short, category and subcategory pages are being used as navigation to allow visitors to easily navigate to the bottom of the hierarchy and shop on the most narrow page in the hierarchy. Much easier to use than a hamburger menu, but it does entail more clicks. The discussion revolves around allowing users to shop for product at a higher level in the taxonomy. For example, what if a visitor wants to shop all Car Seats? In the above taxonomy, we are precluding users from shopping in this manner. There is no "Car Seats" PLP. Our CMS has the ability to create both a Category Page and a PLP for "Car Seats". We could theoretically place an image on the "Car Seats" category page for "View All Car Seats", and allow users to click to a "Car Seats" PLP. None of the major ecommerce players I've audited are adding a PLP option higher up in the hierarchy. That doesn't mean that it's not good UX. Problems: From an SEO perspective, having a Category Page and a PLP for "Car Seats" would cause cannibalization - they would be competing for the same keywords. I am skeptical that canonicals would work. The pages are not near duplicate content. One page has category images, the other has product images. We could place content blocks on the page to make them more similar. We could noindex the PLP, but that's a waste of internal link juice. Need advice: Will canonicals work in this situation? Should we trash this idea entirely? Does adding a PLP add value or confusion? Is noindex a good idea? Is there an option to target keyword variations with the PLP? Is there another solution?
Web Design | | Satans_Apprentice0 -
Referring subdirectory pages from 3rd hierarchy level pages. Will this hurts?
Hi all, We have product feature pages at 3rd tier like website.com/product/features. We have the help guides for each of these features on a different subdirectory like website.com/help/guides. We are linking these help guides from every page of features. So, will it hurts us anywhere just because we are encouraging 4th tier pages in website, moreover they are from different sub-directory. Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
I have a site that has a 302 redirect loop on the home page (www.oncologynurseadvisor.com) i
i am trying to do an audit on it using screaming frog and the 302 stops it. My dev team says it is to discourage Non Human Traffic and that the bots will not see it. Is there any way around this or what can I tell the dev team that shows them it is not working as they state.
Web Design | | HayMktVT0 -
Duplicate Content Home Page http Status Code Query
Hi All, We have just redone a site wide url migration (from old url structure to new url structure) and set up our 301's etc but have this one issue whereby I don't know if' it's a problem of not. We have 1 url - www.Domain.co.uk**/** which has been set up to 301 redirect back to www.domain.co.uk However, when I check the server response code, it comes back as 200. So although it appears to visually 301 redirect if I put the url in the tool bar, the status code says different. Could this be seen as a potential duplicate home page potentially and if so , any idea how I could get around it if we can't solve the root cause of it. This is on a cake php framework, thanks PEte
Web Design | | PeteC120 -
Will changing product from Grouped to Simple on my magento category page affect my SEO?
Hi all, A category page on my site http://www.porcelainsuperstore.co.uk/wood-effect.html currently ranks number 3 on Google for the keyword "Wood Effect Tiles" We're currently reorganising some of our product and I would like to know if this is going to affect the SEO and ranking for the above page and keyword. The majority of products on that page are magento grouped products. I would like to change the page so that it displays only the different constituent simple products rather than the grouped products on the category page. My question is, will this have any impact on SEO? I intend on leaving all other data on the category page the same - so the metadata and the description/title etc. Any help/comments would be much appreciated! Ben
Web Design | | piazza0 -
Contact form on home page.
I am looking to add a contact form onto my home page and I was wondering if it made sense to change my index.html to an index.php. If i do make this change, would it have any impact on my search rankings?
Web Design | | bronxpad0 -
Number of links per page?
I'm confused by the number of links that we should put on a page. Our site has a high domain authority but SEOmoz tool and others, plus Google WMT suggests much much less than other sites have - look at Dailymail.co.uk or the Huff post site for example. our site is www.worldtravelguide.net and I'm thinking specifically about the /destinations and each continent like /europe Our site has thousands of pages, trying to create an effective internal linking structure with the limitation of 150 or so links is nearly impossible and ends up with too many navigational pages. We were hit hard by Panda (even though all our content is original, professionally written frequently updated) in favour of bigger brands and considering Google suggests that sites should be designed for users and not SEO these two ideals conflict. Does anyone have any data on what the link limit is? Any other tips or observations would be gratefully received. Thanks, John
Web Design | | JohnFinlayson0 -
Why is Google sending traffic to our homepage, not our optimized pages?
Hello Forum, My team and I just completely redid a yoga eCommerce site, including its SEO. The old version of the site didn't feature page-specific optimization and, as a result, Google's search results for our keywords almost always directed visitors to the homepage. For example, a Google search for the term "yoga bolster" sent users to the homepage, not the product category page for yoga bolsters. After redoing the site and optimizing specific pages (i.e. the yoga bolster page is now optimized for the keyword "yoga bolster"), the Google search results are still taking users to the homepage, not the optimized page. (i.e. if you search for yoga bolster, find our search result, and click the search result link, you're taken to the homepage, not the bolster page) It's only been about 36 hours since we've launched the new website and submitted it to Google's webmaster tools. Does anyone know why Google is still sending people to our homepage and not the keyword-optimized pages we created? Is this a timing issue?
Web Design | | pano0