60,000 404 errors
-
Do 404 errors on a large scale really matter? I'm just aware that I now have over 60,000 and was wondering if the community think that I should address them by putting 301 redirects in place.
Thanks
-
Hi there
Check your sitemap and update your internal links. This usually helps takes care of a major portion of your problem.
From there, check your backlinks and make sure you update those that are relevant to your site and remove those that are not.
I would take a look at the 404 list - see what pages you could easily redirect to relevant pages the user would still find valuable, and custom 404 the others. You could also 410 pages, but I would use that wisely, because it's not really that necessary.
Lastly, here's a great resource from Matt Cutts on SEW that helps SEOs handle eCommerce 404s.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
I had similar issues on large e-commerce websites, where these pages were not in navigation, but were in Google's index, so Webmaster Tools reported tens of thousands of 404s.
Keeping this many 301 redirections would have put a large load on the server, so we made sure that navigation and site search doesn't link to these pages and later Google removed them from its index.
On the other hand, Peter is right. It depends on the ratio of live and broken pages. If you have 100k pages and 60k is 404, then Google will most likely ignore your website's crawling and indexing of new pages. You need to have a very dodgy website to trigger a Panda penalty, though. 404 happens all the time and Google is quite patient with the website admins to fix it.
-
Yes - large scale 404 can trigger Panda:
http://themoralconcept.net/pandalist.htmlBut don't 301 them. Just fix links from source pages where clicking lead to 404 - replace them with other pages similar to missing one.
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
-
How to get rid of bot verification errors
I have a client who sells highly technical products and has lots and lots (a couple of hundred) pdf datasheets that can be downloaded from their website. But in order to download a datasheet, a user has to register on the site. Once they are registered, they can download whatever they want (I know this isn't a good idea but this wasn't set up by us and is historical). On doing a Moz crawl of the site, it came up with a couple of hundred 401 errors. When I investigated, they are all pages where there is a button to click through to get one of these downloads. The Moz error report calls the error "Bot verification". My questions are:
Technical SEO | | mfrgolfgti
Are these really errors?
If so, what can I do to fix them?
If not, can I just tell Moz to ignore them or will this cause bigger problems?0 -
301ing 404's
Hey guys, I am currently in the process of redirecting some of my 404 pages to pages like my home page. Before I do that, I am assessing the link value of the 404 pages. My question is what do you do with the 404 pages which appear to have low quality links, do you really want to redirect them to an important page on your site? What should I do with these 404 pages? CheersAdam
Technical SEO | | Adamshowbiz0 -
Pages Linking to Sites that Return 404 Error
We have just a few 404 errors on our site. Is there any way to figure out which pages are linking to the pages that create 404 errors? I would rather fix the links than create new 301 redirects. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jsillay0 -
404 error - but I can't find any broken links on the referrer pages
Hi, My crawl has diagnosed a client's site with eight 404 errors. In my CSV download of the crawl, I have checked the source code of the 'referrer' pages, but can't find where the link to the 404 error page is. Could there be another reason for getting 404 errors? Thanks for your help. Katharine.
Technical SEO | | PooleyK0 -
How to fix this 404 : Error ( 4XX (Client Error) )
In my report this indicates 404 : Error http://www.thexxxhouse.com/what_sets_us_aparat.html This web page removed from server .How to fix this in SEO friendly way .
Technical SEO | | innofidelity0 -
Disappeared from Google with in 2 hours of webmaster tools error
Hey Guys I'm trying not to panic but....we had a problem with google indexing some of our secure pages then hit those pages and browsers firing up security warning, so I asked our web dev to have at look at it he made the below changes and within 2 hours the site has drop off the face of google “in web master tools I asked it to remove any https://freestylextreme.com URLs” “I cancelled that before it was processed” “I then setup the robots.txt to respond with a disallow all if the request was for an https URL” “I've now removed robots.txt completely” “and resubmitted the main site from web master tools” I've read a couple of blog posts and all say to remain clam , test the fetch bot on webmasters tools which is all good and just wait for google to reindex do you guys have any further advice ? Ben
Technical SEO | | elbeno1 -
Problem with 1 Domain but not 60 Others
Hi, I have about 60+ domains which are spread across a few different IP address's and a couple of Servers The domains use the same template, which is modified per the specific domain Out of the 60, a single domain attracts virtually no traffic. In google webmaster, there are no messages, nothing out of the order The supporting blogs etc... for that domain are all fine. Any idea why one domain does not perform, while the other 60 plug are successful?
Technical SEO | | Bucky0 -
My pages says it has 16 errors, need help
My pages says it has 16 errors, and all of them are due to duplicate content. How do I fix this? I believe its only due to my meta tag description.
Technical SEO | | gaji0