1,300,000 404s
-
Just moved a WordProcess site over to a new host and skinned it. Found out after the fact that the site had been hacked - the db is clean.
I did notice at first there were a lot of 404s being generated, so I setup a script to capture and then return a 410 page gone - and then the plan was to submit them to have them removed from the index - thinking there was a manageable number
But, when I looked at Google WebMaster Tools there was over 1,300,000 404 errors - see attachment. My puny attempt to solve this problem seems to need more of an industrial size solution.
My question, is that what would be the best way to deal with this? Not all of the pages are indexed in google - only 637 index but you can only see about 150 in the index. Where bing is another story saying that over 2,700 pages index but only can see about 200.
How is this affecting any future rankings - they do not rank well, as I found out because of very slow page load speed and of course the hacks?
The link profile looking at Google is OK, and there are no messages in Google Webmaster tools.
-
Agree with that, one of our sites has 10 million 404 errors as we deal with a lot of changing content over tens of millions of pages. It doesn't look an increase in 404 errors caused any trouble.
-
According to Google's John Muller
"404 errors on invalid URLs do not harm your site’s indexing or ranking in any way. It doesn’t matter if there are 100 or 10 million, they won’t harm your site’s ranking"
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
-
Is there a way to set up 301 auto redirects from 404s
some of our pages under a specific website section gets deleted from another data source and we want to resolve the problem of 404s can we set up automated 301 redirects to the main page as soon as one of these pages are deleted
Technical SEO | | lina_digital2 -
Why is "Article 1 - x of y" showing up in this SERP?
Does anybody have an explanation why this is showing up in the SERP? Ju3VYsW.png
Technical SEO | | jmueller0 -
Thousands of 404s
Hi there, I'm working on a site that has a ridiculous number of 404s being returned by webmaster tools. We believe this was because there was an onpage error that was amending the urls and adding in folders that shouldn't have been in a big spiral i.e. /salons/uk/teeth became something like /salons/uk/teeth/salons/edinburgh/hair/teeth... Anyway, we think the issue is now sorted, but these pages were indexed it seems, and so it looks like Google is still searching for them when it crawls the site. What's my best move? It's the sheers volume (over 13,000) that has me concerned so I thought it best to seek some expert advice before continuing. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | LeahHutcheon0 -
When we have 301 page is a Rel=Canonical needed or should we make 1 Noindex?
Hi, When we have a page as 301 (Permanent Redirect) is a Rel=Canonical needed or should we make 1 Noindex? Example http://www.Somename.com/blog/138760 when clicked goes to http://www.Somename.com/blogs/whenittyam Should i noindex the below pages http://www.Somename.com/blog/138760 and add Rel=Canonical Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Ranked on Page 1, now between page 40-50... Please help!
My site, http://goo.gl/h0igI was ranking on page one for many of our biggest keywords. All of a sudden, we completely fell off. I believe I'm down somewhere between page 40-50. I have no warning or error messages in webmaster tools. Can anyone please help me identify what the problem is? This is completely unexpected and I don't know how to fix it... Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Sitemap for dynamic website with over 10,000 pages
If I have a website with thousands of products, is it a good idea to create a sitemap for this website for the search engines where you show maybe 250 products on a page so it makes it easy for the search engine to find the part and also puts that part closer to the home page? Seems like google likes pages that are the closest to the home page (less clicks the better)
Technical SEO | | roundbrix0 -
Images on page appear as 404s to Googlebot
When I fetch my website as Googlebot it returns 404s for all the images on the page. This despite the fact that each image is hyperlinked! What could be causing this issue? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Netpace0 -
OnPage Issues with UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1
Hi guys, I hope somebody can help me figure this out. On one of my sites I set the charset to UTF-8 in the content-type meta-tag. The file itself is also UTF-8. If I type german special chars like ä, ö, ß and the like they get displayed as a tilted square with a questionmark inside. If I change the charset to iso-8859-1 they are getting displayed properly in the browser but services like twitter are still having the issues and stop "importing" content once they reach one of those specialchars. I would like to avoid having to htmlencode all on-page content, so my preference would be using UTF-8.. You can see it in action when you visit this URL for example: http://www.skgbickenbach.de/aktive/1b/artikel/40-minuten-fußball-reichen-nicht_1045?charset=utf-8 Remove the ?charset parameter and the charset it set to iso-8859-1. Hope somebody has an answer or can push me into the right direction. Thanks in advance and have a great day all. Jan
Technical SEO | | jmueller0