What should I do with all these 404 pages?
-
I have a website that Im currently working on that has been fairly dormant for a while and has just been given a face lift and brought back to life. I have some questions below about dealing with 404 pages.
In Google WMT/search console there are reports of thousands of 404 pages going back some years. It says there are over 5k in total but I am only able to download 1k or so from WMT it seems.
I ran a crawl test with Moz and the report it sent back only had a few hundred 404s in, why is that?
Im not sure what to do with all the 404 pages also, I know that both Google and Moz recommend a mixture of leaving some as 404s and redirect others and Id like to know what the community here suggests.
The 404s are a mix of the following:
Blog posts and articles that have disappeared (some of these have good back-links too)
Urls that look like they used to belong to users (the site used to have a forum) which where deleted when the forum was removed, some of them look like they were removed for spam reasons too eg /user/buy-cheap-meds-online and others like that
Other urls like this /node/4455 (or some other random number)
Im thinking I should permanently redirect the blog posts to the homepage or the blog but Im not sure what to do about all the others? Surely having so many 404s like this is hurting my crawl rate?
-
OK will try that thanks
-
thanks, I have planned to do that, there's so many of them though
-
The posts and articles with good backlinks, does that content still make sense in your renewed site? If so, I'd bring them back. If you don't have the content, you can try the Wayback Machine. The same goes for any old posts you think would be useful to your new readers.
The problem with redirecting a bunch of 404s to the same page (like the homepage) is that you end up with soft 404s and not a very good user experience. Pick the ones that correspond to specific pages that you have on the updated site and redirect those to the equivalent page.
Anything else, I'd let 404. A bunch of old posts, with no good links, the content of which you no longer have a use for on the site don't represent value to searchers—those pages will just drop out of Googles index (and crawl attempts) over time.
[This isn't just theoretical. We changed domains back in November and we had lots of old content—going back 10+ years, which is ancient history for a financial publisher. I ended up with about 6,000 404s. We are now down to about 4,000 404s as pages drop off. Google crawls us quickly and regularly and our organic traffic is up 86.49% .]
-
Remove all internal links leading to 404 pages. If you're using a redirect, your internal links shouldn't link to 404+302->new page either, link straight to the new source.
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
-
404 page cannot be created - Best solution?
Hi all, i am helping a frind with his page, he is very shot on money and cannot spend a dime on programers or learn how to create a 404 page.
Technical SEO | | Gaston Riera
His web is in php laravel, also i dont know how to create one. My options are: Leave the 404 page to be just like that. Redirect, via .htaccess to homepage. What should recommend him to do? Thanks!
GR.0 -
Google showing https:// page in search results but directing to http:// page
We're a bit confused as to why Google shows a secure page https:// URL in the results for some of our pages. This includes our homepage. But when you click through it isn't taking you to the https:// page, just the normal unsecured page. This isn't happening for all of our results, most of our deeper content results are not showing as https://. I thought this might have something to do with Google conducting searches behind secure pages now, but this problem doesn't seem to affect other sites and our competitors. Any ideas as to why this is happening and how we get around it?
Technical SEO | | amiraicaew0 -
Soft 404 errors
Hello Everyone, I recently removed some pages and made a custom 404 page by putting "ErrorDocument 404 http://www.site.com/404.htm" in the htaccess file but WMT now reports soft 404 errors, how do I do this properly? Thanks
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
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 -
Too Many On-Page Links?
How much would this affect my page ranks performance? There are many Too Many On-Page Links? warning on my campaign. should I address this issue right away to fix it or leave it as it would not matter seriously ? I've looked at some of the pages and think all of them are necessary. Could someone help me? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | LauraHT0 -
Specific Link Page in Domain
Hi everyone: I have seen that many SEO Agencies have contacted my business (Also SEO but In- House) in order to interchange links. They have created a specific page on their site with the Label "Links" or similar, and on that page they add multiple links of the competence. I have heard that you can only do that if you make sure you add two things: No follow in links. Not inserting links of websites that have nothing to do with our sector. Either way, I have never found this amusing. I always recommend people not to do this but I have my doubts after all. ¿Could some one give me their opinion? Cheers !
Technical SEO | | Tintanus0 -
Page rank 2 for home page, 3 for service pages
Hey guys, I have noticed with one of our new sites, the home page is showing page rank two, whereas 2 of the internal service pages are showing as 3. I have checked with both open site explorer and yahoo back links and there are by far more links to the home page. All quality and relevant directory submissions and blog comments. The site is only 4 months old, I wonder if anyone can shed any light on the fact 2 of the lesser linked pages are showing higher PR? Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nextman0 -
Removing Duplicate Pages
Hi everyone. I'm sure this falls under novice seo question. But how do i remove duplicate pages from my site. I have not created the pages per say. Their may be a an internal link on a page that links to the page causing the duplication. Do i remove the internal link here is a sample of a duplicate page http://www.ticketplatform.com/about/ticket-industry-news-details/11-03-07/Ticket_Platform_to_help_LilysProject_com_to_raise_money_for_ALYN_Hospital_in_Israel.aspx?ReturnURL=%2fabout%2fticket-industry-news.aspx http://www.ticketplatform.com/about/ticket-industry-news-details/11-03-07/Ticket_Platform_to_help_LilysProject_com_to_raise_money_for_ALYN_Hospital_in_Israel.aspx?ReturnURL=%2fhome.aspx&CntPageID=1 I know the url is way too long. working on it Thanks for your feedbacks.
Technical SEO | | ticketplatform0