Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode.

Please download a browser that supports JavaScript, or enable it if it's disabled (i.e. NoScript).

Best practice to redirect all 404s?

Intermediate & Advanced SEO

391

kayl87 last edited by

Hey is it best practice to redirect all 404 pages.

For example if the 404 pages had 0 traffic and no links why would you need to redirect that page?

Isn't it best practice just to leave as a 404?

Cheers.
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
KevinBudzynski last edited by

Hey is it best practice to redirect all 404 pages. If the page that was taken down has no inbounds links or a relevant substitute landing page, 404's are fine.

For example if the 404 pages had 0 traffic and no links why would you need to redirect that page? If it has a contextual-relevant landing page, use a 301. Even it has no traffic, it may have organic rankings and/or traffic until it gets dropped from the serps.
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 1

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.

Start my free trial

Browse Questions

View

From

Sorted by

With category

Explore more categories

Related Questions

Country Redirect Javascript

We are building a new site on .com and wish to redirect traffic from US to a dedicated US-specific version of the homepage , whereas international traffic will go to the standard homepage. We acknowledge the problems of IP redirection and googlebot crawling from US. So instead we are considering a Javascript pop-up if we recognise a US visitor (based on IP) which asks the user if they wish to view the US version or International version. We will store cookie of preferred selection for future visits. Within the site we will have a US/International selector. Can Moz community members confirm this is the best approach? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjalc2011

0
Best practice for disallowing URLS with Robots.txt

Hi Everybody, We are currently trying to tidy up the crawling errors which are appearing when we crawl the site. On first viewing, we were very worried to say the least:17000+. But after looking closer at the report, we found the majority of these errors were being caused by bad URLs featuring: Currency - For example: "directory/currency/switch/currency/GBP/uenc/aHR0cDovL2NlbnR1cnlzYWZldHkuY29tL3dvcmt3ZWFyP3ByaWNlPTUwLSZzdGFuZGFyZHM9NzEx/" Color - For example: ?color=91 Price - For example: "?price=650-700" Order - For example: ?dir=desc&order=most_popular Page - For example: "?p=1&standards=704" Login - For example: "customer/account/login/referer/aHR0cDovL2NlbnR1cnlzYWZldHkuY29tL2NhdGFsb2cvcHJvZHVjdC92aWV3L2lkLzQ1ODczLyNyZXZpZXctZm9ybQ,,/" My question now is as a novice of working with Robots.txt, what would be the best practice for disallowing URLs featuring these from being crawled? Any advice would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | centurysafety

0
What is best practice for "Sorting" URLs to prevent indexing and for best link juice ?

We are now introducing 5 links in all our category pages for different sorting options of category listings.
The site has about 100.000 pages and with this change the number of URLs may go up to over 350.000 pages.
Until now google is indexing well our site but I would like to prevent the "sorting URLS" leading to less complete crawling of our core pages, especially since we are planning further huge expansion of pages soon. Apart from blocking the paramter in the search console (which did not really work well for me in the past to prevent indexing) what do you suggest to minimize indexing of these URLs also taking into consideration link juice optimization? On a technical level the sorting is implemented in a way that the whole page is reloaded, for which may be better options as well.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse

0
Does a 302 redirect pass penalties?

I'm having problems finding a definitive answer to this question, there is a lot of rumour and gossip out there but nothing I can rely on. I'm working with a site that received an unnatural links notice followed by a massive drop in search traffic. Looking at the link profile it's pretty much jacked beyond repair and I have recommended that we move over to a fresh domain. However, it's an established brand with many more sources of traffic than organic search. There's no way we can burn all their repeat visits, loyal customers, brand recognition that they've built up over the years so I want to redirect from the old domain to the new. This is not to try and make any SEO gain from the previous site, frankly we don't give a crap about that. We just want to maintain the brand. A 302 is a temporary redirect, this will be a permanent move BUT a 301 will pass on the penalty. So can we safely use a 302 redirect in this situation or is there a better alternative (meta refresh?) Thanks for your help! MB.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattBarker

0
How to decide on which site to 301 redirect

Hi there I'd like your opinions please! My client currently has their website at not-very-good-url.it which has a really good link profile they also have duplicate sites at: much-better-brand-name-url.it and much-better-brand-name-url.com but both these other sites have only a handful of links in. How important do you think a better brand url is? And therefore do you think it would be better to 301 to a better brand URL and take the risk that the link profile will get hit? Or leave the main site where it is and 301 the other two to it? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chammy

0
How to conduct catch 301 redirects & have the separate 301 redirects for the key pages

Hi, We've currently done a site migration mapping and 301 redirecting only the sites key pages. However two GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) is picking a massive amount of 404 areas and there has been some drop in rankings. I want to mitigate the site from further decline, and hence thought about doing a catch 301 - that is 301 redirecting the remaining pages found on the old site back to the home page, with the future aim of going through each URL one by one to redirect them to the page which is most relevant. Two questions, (1) can I do a catch 301 and if so what is the process and requirements that I have to give to the developer? (2) How do you reduce the number of increasing 404 errors from a site, despite doing 301 redirects and updating links on external linking sites. Note: The server is apache and the site is hosted on Wordpress platform. Regards, Vahe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vahe.Arabian

0
Is it ok to redirect

Hello my question is presently we holding one .com for our website and i see in analytics some time people typing .es version of our site too.. which is not registered yet. is it ok to buy that .es extension and do a redirect to our .com version ? thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | idreams

0
Best practice to redirects based on visitors' detected language

One of our websites has two languages, English and Italian. The English pages are available at the root level:
www.site.com/ English homepage www.site.com/page1
www.site.com/page2 The Italian pages are available under the /it/ level:
www.site.com/it Italian homepage www.site.com/it/pagina1
www.site.com/it/pagina2 When an Italian visitor first visits www.mysit.com we'd like to redirect it to www.site.com/it but we don't know if that would impact search engine spiders (eg GoogleBot) in any way... It would be better to do a Javascript redirect? Or an http 3xx redirect? If so, which of the 3xx redirect should we use? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Damiano

0