Does it matter? 404 v.s. 302 > Page Not Found
-
Hey Mozers,
What are your thoughts of this situation i'm stuck in all inputs welcome
I am in the middle of this massive domain migration to a new server. Also we are going to be having a very clean SEO friendly url structure. While I was doing some parsing and cleaning up some old urls I stumbled upon a strange situation on my website.
I have a bunch of "dead pages" and they are 302'd to a "page not found" probably a old mistake of one of the past developers. (To clarify the HTTP Status code is not 404)
Should I try to fight to get all these "dead pages" a 404 error code or could I just leave the temp redirect 302 > "page not found" ( even though I know for a fact theses pages are not going to turn on again)
-
Ya, that's a mess. Either 301 to a live page or let the 404 be delivered on its own.
-
Looks like my stystem is set up to 301 to a 404. Which do you think Google with honor? (the 301 or the 404)
Also wouldn't having a 301 to a 404 keep bots crawling our server because its a redirect instead of the server providing a 404 or 410
-
Depending upon how many you have (you said "a bunch"), there are multiple ways of fixing this.
If you are using a CMS, you can install a universal 404 handler, which will either direct a 404 page to the top level menu item of that group, or to the home page. If using a asp or html, I'm sure a decent developer could code one up for you.
If the dead pages are ranked (indexed) pages, I would make sure they forward to the new page that exists on your new server.
-
It sounds like they're 302'ing to a 200 instead of a 404 to a page that says, "page not found"... In that case, you should get them to be legitimate 404s or 410s. A custom 404 page would be a nice touch as well to help clean up the navigation.
By the time you migrate (via 301) you could point these to the most applicable section of your new site where they should have pointed on the old site and be pretty much done with your clean up.
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
-
Are you seeing 404's from utililab.mysearchguardian.com?
I've been noticing a lot of 404's popping up in my Google Webmaster accounts coming from utililab.mysearchguardian.com. Utililab itself seems to be some sort of malware, but why is Google indexing it and sending 404's?
Algorithm Updates | | EthanThompson0 -
Rel canonical on every page of wordpress CMS website
Can we have rel=canonical across all pages of a wordpress CMS website? I don't know why same page has been as canonical but not for duplicate pages
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
Why is Page Authority dropping?
Hi I'm trying to review pages which have previously ranked, but in March have dropped out completely. Some of these pages I can see have dropped to having a Page Authority of 1, we haven't changed anything on these pages, so is there a reason why the authority has dropped? These pages only had around 8 - 10 Page Authority to begin with. I'm trying to identify why we have lost keywords, and if it has anything to do with the Google Updates in March Here are examples of the pages with drops: http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/heavy-duty-shelving-1830x1830mm-blue-orange
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey
http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/metal-feet-for-heavy-duty-steel-shelving
http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/health-and-safety-law-poster-a2 Thank you!0 -
Is there any way to prevent Google from using structured data on specific pages?
I've noticed that Google is now serving what looks like host-specific video cards on mobile for our site. Is there any way to control which videos are included in these lists without removing the structured data on those clip pages or user pages? We don't want to noindex those pages but we don't want content from those pages to appear as video cards. 1kzPW
Algorithm Updates | | Garrett570 -
How is this possible? #2 ranking with NO on-page keywords, no backlinks, no sitemap...
Hi everybody. I have a question ... I'm totally stumped. This question is being asked today (November 16th, 2015) just after Google updated something in their algorithm. Nobody seems to know what they did. and it has something to do with the new "Rank Brain" system they're now using. My niche is Logo Design Software (https://www.thelogocreator.com). I had the keywords "logo creator" on the page roughly 7 times. After Google updated, I lost about 10 spots and as of this writing, I've dropped to #15. So, maybe I over optimized. fine. Noticing that for the keyword "logo creator" ... NONE of the top 14 spots actually have "logo creator" in their page title and NONE of them have more that 2 instances (if any) of the keyword "logo creator" on the actual page. So I removed ALL instances of my keyword "logo creator" from my home page - used the Webmaster's Fetch Tool and moved up a few spots instantly. So what the heck? And the #2 spot for that keyword is www.logomakr.com - they have NO words at all on their pages, no blog, no sitemap and far fewer links than anybody in the top 10. Can anybody reading this shed some light? Marc Marc Sylvester
Algorithm Updates | | Laughingbird
Laughingbird Software0 -
Changing the # of results per page in Google search settings displays totally different results. Why is this?
Curious what's going on here. This is the first time I've seen this before. What's happening is this ... In Google, I search for "mobile apps orange county" and get a standard list of 10 results. I go to Google's search settings in the top right corner of the page (button is grey with a gear) to change the number of results per page from 10 to 50 (also did 100). When I go back to Google and search again for "mobile apps orange county" I get a much larger list but with completely different results. This time around the top 10-12 are dominated by the same website (ocregister.com) What's going on here that Google would now show different results? Why is this one website all of a sudden dominating the first 12 results? Thanks everyone! ByteLaunch
Algorithm Updates | | ByteLaunch0 -
Why is my domain URL ranking instead of individual pages?
Hello, Google is ranking my homepage for many keywords instead of showing the various sites pages? Any idea why? Thanks, David
Algorithm Updates | | DavidSpivac0 -
Help on Page Load Time
I'm trying to track page load time of the visits on my site and GA only says to me that it's equal to zero and page load sample is aways zero too. I've made a research, and I found that GA is used to track page load time automatically, isn't it?
Algorithm Updates | | ivan.precisodisso0