Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
What to do with removed pages and 404 error
-
I recently removed about 600 'thin' pages from my site which are now showing as 404 errors in WMT as expected. As I understand it I should just let these pages 404 and eventually they'll be dropped from the index. There are no inbound links pointing at them so I don't need to 301 them. They keep appearing in WMT as 404's though so should I just 'mark as fixed' until they stop appearing? Is there any other action I need to take?
-
If they are truly gone, then a 410 would be the best option for you. Since they are indexed even if there are no links pointing at them, people can still find them besed upon what they are searching for. You never know when your link will show up, because you dont know how long google is going to take to get rid of the links.
http://www.checkupdown.com/status/E410.html
"The 410 error is primarily intended to assist the task of Web maintenance by notifying the client system that the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the Web server wants remote links to the URL to be removed. Such an event is common for URLs which are effectively dead i.e. were deliberately time-limited or simply orphaned. The Web server has complete discretion as to how long it provides the 410 error before switching to another error such as 404"
We did this for a client that needed old defunct pages removed. Once you set the pages to return a 410, and use Google url removal tool, you should see them dropping off really quick. (all of ours were gone within a month) Having that many pages return a 404 may be hurting the experience of your users as when they see a 404, they go right for the back button.
-
410 is the recommended way to tell search engines the page is gone. all of the things mentioned above are a facet of how you should deal with this issue. sorry for the brevity and terrible punction. moz forum is a pretty iffy thing via mobile. my eggs are getting cold.
-
Hi!
The reason why these pages keep popping up in WMT is that they have already been indexed. You could try to remove them from Google's index by using the removal tool in WMT (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/url-removal) or by setting up "301 Redirect" for them to more ideal pages.
Hope this helps
Anders -
Hi,
I would look at this from two perspectives.
1. These thins pages could have been beefed-up with some unique content or at least the content could have been re-written to make them unique. Personally, I prefer to make the duplicate pages unique instead of deleting them.This of course depends on the number of pages and the level of duplication.
2. Now that these pages have been removed from the website, you should be erasing all the links to these from within the website from all the places like, sitemaps and internal linking so that the search engines do not find a link pointing to them that might end-up in a 404 error. You should also consider if there have been any references left to these pages from third-party web properties.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
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
-
Hreflang Errors 404 vs "Page Not Found"
For a websites that differ between catalogs (PDPs) what hreflang error causes the least harm? Obviously the best solution is to only have hreflang for shared products, but this takes more work to implement. So when no identical product exists... 1. Hreflang points to 404 or 410 error. 2. Hreflang points to 200 status "Page Not Found" page. This obviously has the additional issue of needing to point back to 100+ urls. I want to avoid having Google decide to ignore all hreflang due to errors as many correct urls will exist. Any thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | rigelcable0 -
Should I optimize my home-page or a sub-page for my most important keyword
Quick question: When choosing the most important keyword set that I would like to rank for, would I be better off optimizing my homepage, or a sub page for this keyword. My thinking goes as follows: The homepage (IE www.mysite.com) naturally has more backlinks and thus a better Google Page Rank. However, there are certain things I could do to a subpage (IE www.mysite.com/green-widgets-los-angeles ) that I wouldn't want to do to the homepage, which might be more "optimal" overall. Option C, I suppose, would be to optimize both the homepage, and a single sub-page, which is seeming like a pretty good solution, but I have been told that having multiple pages optimized for the same keywords might "confuse" search engines. Would love any insight on this!
On-Page Optimization | | Jacob_A2 -
Random /feed 404 error from a wordpress site
My Moz Analytics report shows a 404 error on a page which I think should not exist at all. The URL is http://henryplumbingco.com/portfolio-item/butler-elementary/feed/. When I checked webmaster tools, it looks like there are a number of random /feed urls throwing 404 errors. I am using WordPress and the Enfold theme. Anyone know how to get rid of these errors? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | aj6130 -
Should i remove the nofollow from mediawiki?
We have a website which uses mediawiki for public documentation. The moz crawler keeps nagging us that 50% of our sites have the nofollow-metatag. (And noindex for that matter). This is information pages and such in mediawiki. From a SEO perspective: Should we remove these tags? I assume they probably do not hurt? If we shouldn't remove the tags: Is there any way to get moz to ignore these pages so we can get rid of this "noise" in the moz-panel?
On-Page Optimization | | Host10 -
Home page or landing page?
Hello, I want to ask a question related to that - Should we put keywords in the home page title if we wish to position another landing page better for particular keywords? I have read in one website about SEO that it's good the main keywords of your website to be positioned in homepage title also. f.e. Let's say we have website about web-design and our company is named Company Ltd. The title of the home page is "Company Ltd. - Web design, SEO, etc" We have also another inner page named "Web design | Company Ltd.". So should we leave the first page name only "Company Ltd." and the landing page's name "Web design | Company Ltd." . I don't know if they both have the same keyword in their title they won't compete with each other.
On-Page Optimization | | HrishikeshKarov0 -
What is on page links?
Hi - i would like to know exactly what an on page link is? i understand the linking system however cant work what exactly what an on page link is? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | OasisLandDevelopment0 -
Missing meta descriptions on indexed pages, portfolio, tags, author and archive pages. I am using SEO all in one, any advice?
I am having a few problems that I can't seem to work out.....I am fairly new to this and can't seem to work out the following: Any help would be greatly appreciated 🙂 1. I am missing alot of meta description tags. I have installed "All in One SEO" but there seems to be no options to add meta descriptions in portfolio posts. I have also written meta descriptions for 'tags' and whilst I can see them in WP they don't seem to be activated. 2. The blog has pages indexed by WP- called Part 2 (/page/2), Part 3 (/page/3) etc. How do I solve this issue of meta descriptions and indexed pages? 3. There is also a page for myself, the author, that has multiple indexes for all the blog posts I have written, and I can't edit these archives to add meta descriptions. This also applies to the month archives for the blog. 4. Also, SEOmoz tells me that I have too many links on my blog page (also indexed) and their consequent tags. This also applies to the author pages (myself ). How do I fix this? Thanks for your help 🙂 Regards Nadia
On-Page Optimization | | PHDAustralia680 -
URL for location pages
Hello all We would like to create clean, easy URLs for our large list of Location pages. If there are a few URLs for each of the pages, am I right when I'm saying we would like this to be the canonical? Right now we would like the URL to be: For example
On-Page Optimization | | Ferguson
Domain.com/locations/Columbus I have found some instances where there might be 2,3 or more locations in the same city,zip. My conclusion for these would be: adding their Branch id's on to the URL
Domain.com/locations/Columbus/0304 Is this an okay approach? We are unsure if the URL should have city,State,zip for SEO purposes?
The pages will have all of this info in it's content
BUT what would be best for SEO and ranking for a given location? Thank you for any info!0