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
-
Homepage not ranking main keywords - structure error?
Dear, Moz community We have an issue. We have a classified advertisement website. Our website is built like this**homepage (**Optimized for main keyword, has latest listings from all categories ) - category 1 (we did not want to add alteration of the keyword we want to rank homepage, as we thought this would "compete" with homepage) - category 2 - category 3 - **category **4 The listing URLs look like this www.example.com/categoryname/listingname Now the issue is that the homepage is not ranking at all for the main keywords. When we used URL structure like this "example.com/main-keyword-listing-id" homepage was ranking (other sites). Now with new site we used the best practice and added url's as described above (/categoryname/listingid).This caused our homepage not to rank at all for the main keywords.What did we do wrong? We want our homepage to rank for the main keyword and categories for theirs. Should we 1. Change the category 1 name to main keyword (maybe some long tail) so we have the main keyword in URLs? So at least one of the main categories has the main keyword in the listing URLs2. Should we change the category listing urls all back to /main-keyword-listing-id? We thought that this was a bit spammy, so that´s why we used categories. _This means that all listings have same URL name and not best for ranking cateogries_3. Just link back to homepage internally with the main keyword and google should catch that? _Currently in menu you go to homepage clicking HOME but we can add for example our main keyword there - Latest car advertisements _I would be happy of any feedback.
Technical SEO | | advertisingtech0 -
Micro Data Schema Error - How to solve?
For my Ecommerce site suddenly following errors occurred while I test my homepage in structured data testing tools - Error - image- A value for the image field is required. Name - A value for the image field is required. On right side of tool it's show me - Warning - address - The address field is recommended. Please provide a value if available. pricerange - The priceRange field is recommended. Please provide a value if available. telephone - The telephone field is recommended. Please provide a value if available. On right side of tool it's show me - Please let me know how to solve this errors and warnings? I have implemented schema via micro data. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | adamjack0 -
Odd 404 pages
Evening all, I've performed a Screaming Frog technical crawl of a site, and it's returning links like this as 404s: http://clientsite.co.uk/accidents-caused-by-colleagues/js/modernizr-2.0.6.min.js Now, I recognise that Modernizr is used for detecting features in the user's browser - but why would it have created an indexed page that no longer exists? Would you leave them as is? 410 them? Or do something else entirely? Thanks for reading, I look forward to hearing your thoughts! Kind regards, John.
Technical SEO | | Muhammad-Isap0 -
What to do with 404 errors when you don't have a similar new page to 301 to ??
Hi If you have 404 errors for pages that you dont have similar content pages to 301 them to, should you just leave them (the 404's are optimised/qood quality with related links & branding etc) and they will eventually be de-indexed since no longer exist or should you 'remove url' in GWT ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
What if 404 Error not possible?
Hi Everyone, I get an 404 error in my page if the URL is simply wrong, but for some parameters, like if a page has been deleted, or has expired, I get an error page indicating that the ID is wrong, but no 404 error. It is for me very difficult to program a function in php that solve the problem and modify the .htaccess with the mod_rewrite. I ask the developer of the system to give a look, but I am not sure if I will get an answer soon. I can control the content of the deleted/expired page, but the URL will be very similar to those that are ok (actually the url could has been fine, but now expired). Thinking of solutions I can set the expired/deleted pages as noindex, would it help to avoid duplicated title/description/content problem? If an user goes to i.e., mywebsite.com/1-article/details.html I can set the head section to noindex if it has expired. Would it be good enough? Other question, is it possible anyhow to set the pages as 404 without having to do it directly in the .htacess, so avoiding the mod_rewrite problems that I am having? Some magical tag in the head section of the page? Many thanks in advance for your help, Best Regards, Daniel
Technical SEO | | te_c0 -
Odd 404 Errors in WP That I cannot find the origin
Hello Everyone, I have a really odd error that I cannot figure out how to fix. I keep getting a 404 error (through google webmaster tools, and SEOmoz) at this url http://www.cio-tech.com/cios-oracle-optimization-results-roi-justification-save-20m-over-5-years/www.SynSynAck.com... I am not even too sure how this link originated because the first part is a URL to a blog post, and the second is another website that I have. I'd appreciate any help on the matter.
Technical SEO | | Packetman0070 -
Can you 404 any forms of URL?
Hi seomozzers, <colgroup><col width="548"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F256%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F258%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F242%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F257%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F260%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F225%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F251%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F176%23comment-form | These are duplicate content and the canonical version is: http://www.ex.com/user (login and pass page of the website) Since there were multiple other duplicates which mostly have been resolved by 301s, I figured that all "LOGIN" URLs (above) should be 404d since they don't carry any authority and 301 those wouldn't be the best solution since "too many 301s" can slow down the website speed. But a member of the dev team said: "Looks like all the urls requested to '404 redirect' are actually the same page http://ex.com/user/login. The only part of the url that changes is the variables after the "?" . I don't think you can (or highly not recommended) make 404 pages display for variables in a url. " So my question is: I am not sure what he means by that? and Is it really better to not 404 these? Thanks0 -
Thousands of 503 Errors
I was just checking Google Webmaster Tools for one of the first times (I know this should have been a regular habit). I noticed that on Feb 8th we had almost 80K errors of type 503. This is obviously very alarming because as far as I know our site was up and available that whole day. This makes me wonder if there is a firewall issue or something else that I'm not aware of. Any ideas for the best way to determine what's causing this? Thanks, Chris
Technical SEO | | osports0