Are thousands of 404s a problem?
-
An ecommerce site I work on has around 16,000 URLs that are 404s in Webmaster Tools. The vast majority are for products that are no longer stocked by the site, which is a natural occurrence in ecommerce.
But my question is, could these possibly be harming rankings?
-
It's not necessarily an SEO problem (as long as you don't redirect all 404s to your homepage at least. I've seen that be an issue in the past.)
However, use it as an opportunity. Make the 404 a sales page if you have that many. It's a lander now for "the product you were searching for is out of stock - here are the search results on our site for similar products" etc. You can turn it into something productive to have that many 404s.
From WMT, mark them as fixed and then anytime one pops up, find out what is linking to the product and try to remove that link. You don't want to be linking to 404s internally if you can help it (bad user experience = Google's nightmare) so having 1000s of 404s isn't bad but try to break any internal links to them. (Xenu can help as well if you don't feel like waiting for WMT.)
-
As Kevin stated they do not directly impact your ranking.
The user experience might be harmed if the 404 page is not optimized for the user.Using a custom 404 page you can assist the user to further explore the website on which they have arrived. If this is not done they might immediately leave the website and visit another one.
Google uses usage metrics in it's rankings now and therefor a lot of 404 pages might indirectly impact rankings.
-
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
-
Faq problem in wordpress website
hi hi i add script faq in my site but doest show in serp and add moudle ithink may be problem in version wordpress or theme not stable ... my site url is https://giftmax.ir example when i search" خرید گیفت کارت" my competitor show faq script but my site doesnt show please help to resolve this problem thanks moz
Technical SEO | | ahmad21aga0 -
Tags problem I need help
Hello I have a problem on my site and I want to help solve it I allow adding tags in search engines However, when writing new content, tags are not added to search engines This is my website link مجلة الحلوة
Technical SEO | | ahmedahmed3230 -
Local searh results instant preview photo problem
A search result that contains my google plus / places page in the local results is not displaying photos correctly in the preview. It shows an image that appears to represent a broken link or missing image, however, when you click on the "See Photos" link it to takes you to the G+ page that displays the photos without any issues. I also checked the google places account and the photos appear fine in my dashboard. It's seems like maybe a 3rd party uploaded photos or something? It may have to do with the recent upgrade to pages at Google +? (Thats another story, thanks for making me create a circular logo and a cover photo that doesn't style well in your mobile app) Anyway, any thoughts? Where are these photos coming from, plus or places account? I submitted the question on google groups and a non googler told me to submit photos from a unrelated account.. This seems like gaming the system to me and when I looked into it, it takes me to the Google + page.. Search URL - I am first result in local, Yale Creek Seasonal Care. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=&source=hp&q=new+market+mn+snow+removal&oq=new+market+mn+snow+removal&gs_l=hp.3...1801.1801.0.2686.1.1.0.0.0.0.143.143.0j1.1.0.les%3B..0.0...1c.1.5.hp.nKsMdxTGiW0 Also, I noticed the G+ account says service area is 20 miles from address while I specifically selected an area greater than that in my places account.. So what is it plus or places?!?!? The way they are rolling out this move to plus is frustrating! As a consumer, I prefer listings without the plus page!!
Technical SEO | | dwallner0 -
We have set up 301 redirects for pages from an old domain, but they aren't working and we are having duplicate content problems - Can you help?
We have several old domains. One is http://www.ccisound.com - Our "real" site is http://www.ccisolutions.com The 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain works. However, the 301-redirects for interior pages, like: http://www.ccisolund.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators do not work. This URL should redirect to http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators but as you can see it does not. Our IT director supplied me with this code from the HT Access file in hopes that someone can help point us in the right direction and suggest how we might fix the problem: RewriteCond%{HTTP_HOST} ccisound.com$ [NC] RewriteRule^(.*)$ http://www.ccisolutions.com/$1 [R=301,L] Any ideas on why the 301 redirect isn't happening? Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Problems with changing the page title on Wordpress Site...
The website is http://www.masterpieceinteriors.co.uk/ I'm not sure why the homepage title is reading 'masterpieces' in Google but looks fine here. There seem to be 2 versions of the homepage coming up in google - you can see them both by searching 'masterpieceinteriors' and then 'masterpiece interiors'. Some help would be hugely appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Opiyo0 -
Robots.txt file getting a 500 error - is this a problem?
Hello all! While doing some routine health checks on a few of our client sites, I spotted that a new client of ours - who's website was not designed built by us - is returning a 500 internal server error when I try to look at the robots.txt file. As we don't host / maintain their site, I would have to go through their head office to get this changed, which isn't a problem but I just wanted to check whether this error will actually be having a negative effect on their site / whether there's a benefit to getting this changed? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | themegroup0 -
Product ratings causing 302 redirect problem
I am working on an ecommerce site and my crawl report came back with 7000+ 302 redirects and maxed out at 10,000 pages because of all the redirects. The site really only has maybe 1500 pages (dynamic content aside). After looking into it a little more I see it is because of the product rating system. They have a star rating system that kinda looks like amazons. The only problem is that each star is a link to a dynamic address that records the vote and then 302's back to the original page the vote was cast from. So virtually every page on this site links out anywhere from 15 to 45 times and 302's back to itself, losing virtually all of its PR. Am I correct in that assumption or am I missing something? I don't see the links being blocked by robots.txt or noindex, nofollowed. Also it is an anonymous rating system where a rating can be cast from any category page displaying a product or any product page. To make matters worse every page links to a printable version which duplicates the issue by repeating the whole thing over again. So assuming I am correct that is site has a major PR leak on virtually every page, what is the best recommendation to fix this. 1. Block all of those links in robots.txt, 2. no index, nofollow these links or 3. put the rating system behind a submit button or disallow anon ratings 4. something else??? Looking at their product ratings on the site virtually everything is between 2-3 starts out of 5 and has about the same number of votes except less votes on deeper pages. I dont believe this is real at all since this site gets almost no traffic and maybe 1 sale a week, there is no way that any product has been rated 50 times. I think the crawler is voting as it crawls and doing it 5 times for every product which is why everything is rated 2.5 out of 5. This is an x-cart site in case anyone cares. Any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | BlinkWeb0 -
Problem with my site
the site is casino.pt we created the site 7-8 month ago, we started to push it by good and natural links (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/www.casino.pt/a!links!!filter!all!!source!external!!target!page), links in sites with content rich and most of them related to gambling and sport topics. During the first 3-5 months, the rankings were better and better, after the 6 months, the site lose all its rankings. Aditional details http://www.casino.pt/robots.txt http://www.google.pt/#hl=pt-PT&source=hp&biw=1280&bih=805&q=site:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.casino.pt&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&fp=2651649a33cd228 no critical errors in google webmaster tools any idea how can I fix it? thanks
Technical SEO | | Yaron530