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.
Is it a problem to use a 301 redirect to a 404 error page, instead of serving directly a 404 page?
-
We are building URLs dynamically with apache rewrite.
When we detect that an URL is matching some valid patterns, we serve a script which then may detect that the combination of parameters in the URL does not exist. If this happens we produce a 301 redirect to another URL which serves a 404 error page,So my doubt is the following: Do I have to worry about not serving directly an 404, but redirecting (301) to a 404 page? Will this lead to the erroneous original URL staying longer in the google index than if I would serve directly a 404?
Some context. It is a site with about 200.000 web pages and we have currently 90.000 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (even though only 600 detected last month).
-
in webmaster tools 404 are going gradually down for desktop and now suddenly going up for mobile for pages that are not linked to for months.
-
I suspect you may be right.
How long ago did they appear?
Are they starting to go gradually down or up?
-
thanks a lot SilverDoor.
The huge number of errors, were caused by a problem with the internal site architecture several months ago which got thousdands of pages in the index that should not exist (and also have no other related relevanted pages). This architecture is fixed now. Still for some reason mobile crawler of webmaster tools is returning now suddenly lots of 404 for mobile view, which I suspect are coming from old 404 in google cache.
-
Hi,
You should never redirect to a 404 page.
Search Engines are going to see this as an error and may even think you are trying to manipulate users around your site.
I would redirect the pages to a relevant page on your site.
With regards to the huge number of errors now appearing, I need some more details to answer the question:
- How many 404's would you expect there to be (give an estimate)?
- How many 301 redirects do you think would have been implemented with the script?
- Have you recently changed anything else with the HTTP Status Codes?
SilverDoor
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
-
My last site crawl shows over 700 404 errors all with void(0 added to the ends of my posts/pages.
Hello, My last site crawl shows over 700 404 errors all with void(0 added to the ends of my posts/pages. I have contacted my theme company but not sure what could have done this. Any ideas? The original posts/pages are still correct and working it just looks like it did duplicates and added void(0 to the end of each post/page. Questions: There is no way to undo this correct? Do I have to do a redirect on each of these? Will this hurt my rankings and domain authority? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks, Wade
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neverenoughmusic.com0 -
Using a Reverse Proxy and 301 redirect to appear Sub Domain as Sub Directory - what are the SEO Risks?
We’re in process to move WordPress blog URLs from subdomains to sub-directory. We aren’t moving blog physically, but using reverse proxy and 301 redirection to do this. Blog subdomain URL is https://blog.example.com/ and destination sub-directory URL is https://www.example.com/blog/ Our main website is e-commerce marketplace which is YMYL site. This is on Windows server. Due to technical reasons, we can’t physically move our WordPress blog to the main website. Following is our Technical Setup Setup a reverse proxy at https://www.example.com/blog/ pointing to https://blog.example.com/ Use a 301 redirection from https://blog.example.com/ to https://www.example.com/blog/ with an exception if a traffic is coming from main WWW domain then it won’t redirect. Thus, we can eliminate infinite loop. Change all absolute URLs to relative URLs on blog Change the sitemap URL from https://blog.example.com/sitemap.xml to https://www.example.com/blog/sitemap.xml and update all URLs mentioned within the sitemap. SEO Risk Evaluation We have individual GA Tracking ID and individual Google Search Console Properties for main website and blog. We will not merge them. Keep them separate as they are. Keeping this in mind, I am evaluating SEO Risks factors Right now when we receive traffic from main website to blog (or vice versa) then it is considered as referral traffic and new cookies are set for Google Analytics. What’s going to happen when its on the same domain? Which type of settings change should I do in Blog’s Google Search Console? (A). Do I need to request “Change of Address” in the Blog’s search console property? (B). Should I re-submit the sitemap? Do I need to re-submit the blog sitemap from the https://www.example.com/ Google Search Console Property? Main website is e-commerce marketplace which is YMYL website, and blog is all about content. So does that impact SEO? Will this dilute SEO link juice or impact on the main website ranking because following are the key SEO Metrices. (A). Main website’s Avg Session Duration is about 10 minutes and bounce rate is around 30% (B). Blog’s Avg Session Duration is 33 seconds and bounce rate is over 92%
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joshibhargav_200 -
404 Errors flaring on nonexistent or unpublished pages – should we be concerned for SEO?
Hello! We keep getting "critical crawler" notifications on Moz because of firing 404 codes. We've checked each page and know that we are not linking to them anywhere on our site, they are not published and they are not indexed on Google. It's only happened since we migrated our blog to Hubspot so we think it has something to do with the test pages their developers had set up and that they are just lingering in our code somewhere. However, we are still concerned having these codes fire implies negative consequences for our SEO. Is this the case? Should we be concerned about these 404 codes despite the pages from those URLs not actually existing? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DebFF
Chloe0 -
How do you 301 redirect URLs with a hashbang (#!) format? We just lost a ton of pagerank because we thought javascript redirect was the only way! But other sites have been able to do this – examples and details inside
Hi Moz, Here's more info on our problem, and thanks for reading! We’re trying to Create 301 redirects for 44 pages on site.com. We’re having trouble 301 redirecting these pages, possibly because they are AJAX and have hashbangs in the URLs. These are locations pages. The old locations URLs are in the following format: www.site.com/locations/#!new-york and the new URLs that we want to redirect to are in this format: www.site.com/locations/new-york We have not been able to create these redirects using Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v.1.5.3.2. The CMS is WordPress version 3.9.1 The reason we want to 301 redirect these pages is because we have created new pages to replace them, and we want to pass pagerank from the old pages to the new. A 301 redirect is the ideal way to pass pagerank. Examples of pages that are able to 301 redirect hashbang URLs include http://www.sherrilltree.com/Saddles#!Saddles and https://twitter.com/#!RobOusbey.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Block in robots.txt instead of using canonical?
When I use a canonical tag for pages that are variations of the same page, it basically means that I don't want Google to index this page. But at the same time, spiders will go ahead and crawl the page. Isn't this a waste of my crawl budget? Wouldn't it be better to just disallow the page in robots.txt and let Google focus on crawling the pages that I do want indexed? In other words, why should I ever use rel=canonical as opposed to simply disallowing in robots.txt?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
Can we retrieve all 404 pages of my site?
Hi, Can we retrieve all 404 pages of my site? is there any syntax i can use in Google search to list just pages that give 404? Tool/Site that can scan all pages in Google Index and give me this report. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Changing a parent category and 301 redirecting
I have a set of three pages that are subpages of a parent. The structure is as follows: mysite.com/directory/personal-widgets mysite.com/directory/commercial-widgets mysite.com/directory/widgets-services The partent page name "directory" really isn't working for where I want these pages to evolve. So I want to change it to "guides" In a world without worrying about google, I would simply change the parent page to guides, so they look like this, and be done with it: mysite.com/guides/personal-widgets But, the obvious problem is that I have external links to the page now. And the pages have a nice PR. And they also have Facebook page Likes and I don't know if I'll lose those. I know that if I should do this I should redirect the pages to the new pages of course. My question is: Will redirecting the old URL to the new URL with a 301 cause anything negative to happen that I might not be expecting? Does Google dislike Redirects for any reason, or understand they are sometimes necessary?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bizzer0 -
Can penalties be passed via 301 redirect?
I have a well established domain that's been hit with some penalties. It hasn't been nuked off the map, just downgraded, especially on short-tail, one word type queries. I'm planning on redirecting this domain to another well established domain. The domains already have a history of lots of interlinking and are very similar from a subject matter standpoint. I feel that the penalized domain has been hit with an "over-optimization" of link anchor text penalty (I'm hoping it's algorithmic, but it could be manual). My question is if anyone has ever heard of a penalty like this being transferred to another domain through a 301 redirect. My hope is that the penalty just puts a cap on how much juice the redirect can pass, rather than transferring the penalty to the other domain itself. Any thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOMG1