Moved company 'Help Center' from Zendesk to Intercom, got lots of 404 errors. What now?
-
Howdy folks, excited to be part of the Moz community after lurking for years!
I'm a few weeks into my new job (Digital Marketing at Rewind) and about 10 days ago the product team moved our Help Center from Zendesk to Intercom. Apparently the import went smoothly, but it's caused one problem I'm not really sure how to go about solving:
- https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/*** is where all our articles used to sit
- https://help.rewind.io/*** is where all our articles now are
So, for example, the following article has now moved as such:
- https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/115001902152-Can-I-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind-
- https://help.rewind.io/general-faqs-and-billing/frequently-asked-questions/can-i-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind
This has created a bunch of broken URLs in places like our Shopify/BigCommerce app listings, in our email drips, and in external resources etc. I've played whackamole cleaning many of these up, but these old URLs are still indexed by Google – we're up to 475 Crawl Errors in Search Console over the past week, all of which are 404s.
I reached out to Intercom about this to see if they had something in place to help, but they just said my "best option is tracking down old links and setting up 301 redirects for those particular addressed". Browsing the Zendesk forms turned up some relevant-ish results, with the leading recommendation being to configure javascript redirects in the Zendesk document head (thread 1, thread 2, thread 3) of individual articles.
I'm comfortable setting up 301 redirects on our website, but I'm in a bit over my head in trying to determine how I could do this with content that's hosted externally and sitting on a subdomain. I have access to our Zendesk admin, so I can go in and edit stuff there, but don't have experience with javascript redirects and have read that they might not be great for such a large scale redirection.
Hopefully this is enough context for someone to provide guidance on how you think I should go about fixing things (or if there's even anything for me to do) but please let me know if there's more info I can provide.
Thanks!
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
-
Site Migration and Traffic Help!
Hi Moz, I recently migrated my website with the help of an SEO company using 301 redirects. The reason for the move was to change our CMS from .aspx to Drupal/Wordpress. The homepage (www.shiftins.com) and the blog (www.shiftins.com/blog) were the only two pages that kept the same url. Everything else was redirected. It's been about two months since the redirects were completed and traffic has dropped off about 90%. I'm starting to worry that something was not done properly and my traffic may never return. The process for the redirects seem correct when I checked the work the SEO company did. All pages were duplicated, redirected to individual pages, then the old pages were de-indexed. Are there any insights the community can provide? Please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shictins1 -
Help with duplicate pages
Hi there, I have a client who's site I am currently reviewing prior to a SEO campaign. They still work with the development team who built the site (not my company). I have discovered 311 instances of duplicate content within the crawl report. The duplicate content appears to either be 1, 2, or 3 versions of the same pages but with differing URL's. Example: http://www.sitename.com http://sitename.com http://sitename.com/index.php And other pages follow a similar or same pattern. I suppose my question is mainly what could be causing this and how can I fix it? Or, is it something that will have to be fixed by the website developers? Thanks in advance Darren
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODarren0 -
Do 404s really 'lose' link juice?
It doesn't make sense to me that a 404 causes a loss in link juice, although that is what I've read. What if you have a page that is legitimate -- think of a merchant oriented page where you sell an item for a given merchant --, and then the merchant closes his doors. It makes little sense 5 years later to still have their merchant page so why would removing them from your site in any way hurt your site? I could redirect forever but that makes little sense. What makes sense to me is keeping the page for a while with an explanation and options for 'similar' products, and then eventually putting in a 404. I would think the eventual dropping out of the index actually REDUCES the overall link juice (ie less pages), so there is no harm in using a 404 in this way. It also is a way to avoid the site just getting bigger and bigger and having more and more 'bad' user experiences over time. Am I looking at it wrong? ps I've included this in 'link building' because it is related in a sense -- link 'paring'.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood0 -
What are Soft 404's and are they a problem
Hi, I have some old pages that were coming up in google WMT as a 404. These had links into them so i thought i'd do a 301 back to either the home page or to a relevant category or page. However these are now listed in WMT as soft 404's. I'm not sure what this means and whether google is saying it doesn't like this? Any advice welcomed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aikijeff0 -
No matter what I do, my website isn't showing up in search results. What's happening?
I've checked for meta-robots, all SEO tags are fixed, reindexed with google-- basically everything and it's not showing up. According to SEOMoz all looks fine, I am making a few fixes, but nothing terribly major. It's a new website, and i know it takes a while, but there is no movement here in a month. Any insights here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wabash0 -
No longer showing for 'money' phrases but long tail combinations rank high?
I hope someone can shed some light on this as I've been pulling my hair out so much there's hardly any left! Background: 12 year old website that for about 10 years had Top 3 rankings for 100's of phrases but rankings first dropped off August 2011. Panda seemed to be the cause but finding the exact issue is hard. We are an online travel agent and every hotel page has duplicate content copied from other websites. This has not been changed although lots of sections in the site still rank well, so do the hotel pages themselves. Lots of internal duplicate issues have been resolved but with no effect. Our old style link, link, link all day long with our 2-word main key phrase as anchor text has given us an unnatural backlink profile but no message has been left by G about this in WMT (yet). Internal link structure is poor with all pages linking back to the homepage with our 'money' 2-word phrase in 3 places. Penguin wiped two thirds of all our backlinks back in May 2012. Why then, do we still rank for our 'money' phrase on the homepage when it has some extra words included and becomes long tail? e.g. CityName Apartments (money phrase) - Now ranks page 2-3 CityName Apartments to rent for the night - Ranks #2 on Google in all countries To make things more confusing other pages rank really well for similar money phrase e.g. CityName Apartments Offers - Ranks 2nd on 185,000,000 results (not homepage) It seems only the homepage is effected (where 95% of inbound links point) but if the site wide duplicates or unnatural link profile was flagged it would effect more than one page of the site. Wouldn't it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lchoice0 -
How Long Before a URL is 'Too Long'
Hello Mozzers, Two of the sites I manage are currently in the process of merging into one site and as a result, many of the URLs are changing. Nevertheless (and I've shared this with my team), I was under the impression that after a certain point, Google starts to discount the validity of URLs that are too long. With that, if I were to have a URL that was structured as follows, would that be considered 'too long' if I'm trying to get the content indexed highly within Google? Here's an example: yourdomain.com/content/content-directory/article and in some cases, it can go as deep as: yourdomain.com/content/content-directory/organization/article. Albeit there is no current way for me to shorten these URLs is there anything I can do to make sure the content residing on a similar path is still eligible to rank highly on Google? How would I go about achieving this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NiallSmith0 -
Link Juice - Lots of Pages
I have a site, PricesPrices.com where I'm steadily building inbound links and pagerank. I have about 4600 pages on the site, most of which are baby products in the baby gear sector. There are many outdated items that aren't really my focus, but do pop up in long-tail search queries from time to time. My question is a pretty basic one. Theoretically if a site has say 28/100 link juice, then as you go deeper and deeper into the site, the link juice is divided more and more. My question: Is this really true or just a concept? My thoughts are to hide many of the products that i don't really need to focus on therefor passing more link juice to the products that remain, but I also don't want to that if it won't necessarily make the remaining pages rank higher or have more link juice. I also have to keep in mind the merchandising aspect of the site and providing a good user experience. If i only have 300 products on the site, there will be a ton of unhappy people who can't find the products they are looking for. Any thoughts and/or pointers in the direction of funneling that pagerank down into my site would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | modparent0