What should I do about not found pages?
-
I took over a site that had been hacked. A bunch of pages were created that said domain.com/cms/viagra.
The pages are gone but they still show in webmaster tools as not being found, which is what I want. However, should I do anything besides leaving them as 404?
-
Use the tool in GWT, Go to Google Index > Remove URLs
-
How would you recommend removing them?
-
In this instance, I would remove the URLs from the index. You can do that in GWT. The alternative is to leave them as a 404, but that isn't my preferred method. You don't want to redirect them because they are spammy pages that could potentially negatively affect other pages.
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
-
Our protected pages 302 redirect to a login page if not a member. Is that a problem for SEO?
We have a membership site that has links out in our unprotected pages. If a non-member clicks on these links it sends a 302 redirect to the login / join page. Is this an issue for SEO? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | rimix1 -
Very wierd pages. 2900 403 errors in page crawl for a site that only has 140 pages.
Hi there, I just made a crawl of the website of one of my clients with the crawl tool from moz. I have 2900 403 errors and there is only 140 pages on the website. I will give an exemple of what the crawl error gives me. | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | | | | | | | | | | There are 2900 pages like this. I have tried visiting the pages and they work, but they are only html pages without CSS. Can you guys help me to see what the problems is. We have experienced huge drops in traffic since Septembre.
Technical SEO | | H.M.N.0 -
Purchased domain with links - redirect page by page or entire domain?
Hi, I purchased an old domain with a lot of links that I'm redirecting to my site. I want all of their links to redirect to the same page on my site so I can approach this two different ways: Entire site
Technical SEO | | ninel_P
1.) RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.xyz.com or Page by page
2). Redirect 301 /retiredpage.html http://www.xyz.com/newpage.html Is there a better option I should go with in regards to SEO effectiveness? Thanks in advance!0 -
Multiple Common Page Links
Hi everyone - I've taken over SEO for a site recently. In many cases, the reasons why something was done were not well documented. One of these is that on some pages, there are lists of selections. Each selection takes the user to a particular page. On the list page, there is often a link from an image, a name, and a couple of others. Each page often has 30 items with 4 links each. For some reason, the 4th of these internal links were no-followed. When I run this site through several different site evaluation tools, they are all troubled with the number of no-follow links on the site. (These instances from above add up to a 5 figure number). From a user perspective, I totally get why there is a link where each of these links exist. If I wanted to click on the image or the name or some other attribute, that totally makes sense. Its my understanding that Google / Bing are only going to consider the 1st instance. If this creates excessive links, wouldn't you want 3 of the 4 links in each set no-followed? If its only excessive unique links that really matter, then why would any be nofollowed.
Technical SEO | | APFM0 -
Pages removed from Google index?
Hi All, I had around 2,300 pages in the google index until a week ago. The index removed a load and left me with 152 submitted, 152 indexed? I have just re-submitted my sitemap and will wait to see what happens. Any idea why it has done this? I have seen a drop in my rankings since. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TomLondon0 -
Duplicate page titles
Hi, I have a Joomla 2.5 site and I use categoryblogs. So I have a page with "reviews". All the reviews are shown on this page and there are about 15 pages of it. In my SEOMoz crawl result I get 71 errors ! about "duplicate titles". How can I diminish this? I don't know how to show all the reviews in a proper way other than what I have accomplished with categoryblog. Patrick
Technical SEO | | paddydaddy0 -
Can you 301 redirect a page to an already existing/old page ?
If you delete a page (say a sub department/category page on an ecommerce store) should you 301 redirect its url to the nearest equivalent page still on the site or just delete and forget about it ? Generally should you try and 301 redirect any old pages your deleting if you can find suitable page with similar content to redirect to. Wont G consider it weird if you say a page has moved permenantly to such and such an address if that page/address existed before ? I presume its fine since say in the scenario of consolidating departments on your store you want to redirect the department page your going to delete to the existing pages/department you are consolidating old departments products into ?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Getting a citation page indexed
Howdy mozzers, I have a citation on a .govt domain with 2 links pointing to my site. The page is not indexed by Google, bing or yahoo. URL; http://www.familyservices.govt.nz/directory/viewprovider.htm?id=17077 I have tried getting the paged indexed by building bookmark links to it. I have tweeted the url and gotten a few re-tweets for it. But no luck. The page has got no nofollow meta tag. Other listings have been indexed by google. Could someone please advise on means to help me get the page indexed? A strategy that I have not yet tried is submitting a sitemap that includes the external url as I am not sure if it is possible to include url's not part of my domain. Any advice, help would be greatly appreciated. viva le SEOmoz Thanks
Technical SEO | | ihms1