Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Google Search Console Showing 404 errors for product pages not in sitemap?
-
We have some products with url changes over the past several months. Google is showing these as having 404 errors even though they are not in sitemap (sitemap shows the correct NEW url).
Is this expected? Will these errors eventually go away/stop being monitored by Google?
-
@woshea Implement 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new ones. This tells search engines that the old page has permanently moved to a new location. It also ensures that visitors who click on old links are redirected to the correct content.
-
Yes, it is not uncommon for Google to show 404 errors for products with URL changes, even if the correct new URLs are listed in the sitemap. This is because Google's crawlers may take some time to recrawl and update their index with the new URLs.
Typically, these 404 errors should eventually go away and stop being monitored by Google once the search engine has fully indexed and recognized the new URLs. However, the time it takes for this process to happen can vary based on the frequency of Googlebot's crawls and the size of your website. I am also facing this issue in my site flyer maker app and resolve this issue using the below techniques.
-
Ensure that your sitemap is up-to-date and includes all the correct URLs for your products.
-
Check for any internal links on your website that may still be pointing to the old URL and update them to the new URL.
-
Use 301 redirects from the old URL to the new URL. For example, set up a 301 redirect from product old URL to product new URL. This tells Google and other search engines that the content has permanently moved to a new location.
-
-
@woshea Yes, it is not uncommon for Google to show 404 errors for products with URL changes, even if the correct new URLs are listed in the sitemap. This is because Google's crawlers may take some time to recrawl and update their index with the new URLs.
Typically, these 404 errors should eventually go away and stop being monitored by Google once the search engine has fully indexed and recognized the new URLs. However, the time it takes for this process to happen can vary based on the frequency of Googlebot's crawls and the size of your website. I am also facing this issue in my site flyer maker app and resolve this issue using the below techniques.
-
Ensure that your sitemap is up-to-date and includes all the correct URLs for your products.
-
Check for any internal links on your website that may still be pointing to the old URL and update them to the new URL.
-
Use 301 redirects from the old URL to the new URL. For example, set up a 301 redirect from product old URL to product new URL. This tells Google and other search engines that the content has permanently moved to a new location.
-
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
-
Are there ways to avoid false positive "soft 404s" by Google
Sometimes I get alerts from Google Search Console that it has detected soft 404s on different websites, and since I take great care to never have true soft 404s, they are always false positives. Today I got one on a website that has pages promoting some events. The language on the page for one event that has sold out says that "tickets are no longer available" which seems to have tripped up Google into thinking the page is a soft 404. It's kind of incredible to me that in the current era we're in, with things like chatGPT that Google doesn't seem to understand natural language. But that has me thinking, are there some strategies or best practices we can use in how we write copy on the page so Google doesn't flag it as soft 404? It seems like anything that could tell a user that an item isn't available could trip it up into thinking it is a 404. In the case of my page, it's actually important information we need to tell the public that an event has sold out, but to use their interest in that event to promote other events. so I don't want the page deindexed or not to rank well!
Technical SEO | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
Search Console Missing field 'mainEntity'
Hello,
SEO Tactics | | spaininternship
I am with a problem, in my site I added a faq with schema structure (https://internships-usa.eu/faq/). But is appearing the following problem in Search Console:
Missing field 'mainEntity' ["WebPage","FAQPage"],"@id":"https://internships-usa.eu/faq/#webpage","url":"https://internships-usa.eu/faq/","name":"Help Center - Internships USA","isPartOf":{"@id":"https://internships-usa.eu/#website"},"datePublished":"2022-05-31T14:43:15+00:00","dateModified":"2022-06-01T08:07:13+00:00","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https://internships-usa.eu/faq/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https://internships-usa.eu/faq/"]}]}, What do I have to do to solve this?0 -
Why google indexed pages are decreasing?
Hi, my website had around 400 pages indexed but from February, i noticed a huge decrease in indexed numbers and it is continually decreasing. can anyone help me to find out the reason. where i can get solution for that? will it effect my web page ranking ?
Technical SEO | | SierraPCB0 -
How to Stop Google from Indexing Old Pages
We moved from a .php site to a java site on April 10th. It's almost 2 months later and Google continues to crawl old pages that no longer exist (225,430 Not Found Errors to be exact). These pages no longer exist on the site and there are no internal or external links pointing to these pages. Google has crawled the site since the go live, but continues to try and crawl these pages. What are my next steps?
Technical SEO | | rhoadesjohn0 -
How Does Google's "index" find the location of pages in the "page directory" to return?
This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched. These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory". The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls. Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.
Technical SEO | | reidsteven750 -
How to handle (internal) search result pages?
Hi Mozers, I'm not quite sure what the best way is to handle internal search pages. In this case it's for an ecommerce website with about 8.000+ products and search pages currently look like: example.com/search.php?search=QUERY+HERE. I'm leaning towards making them follow, noindex. Since pages like this can be easily abused for duplicate content and because I'd rather have the category pages ranked. How would you handle this?
Technical SEO | | Qon0 -
NoIndex/NoFollow pages showing up when doing a Google search using "Site:" parameter
We recently launched a beta version of our new website in a subdomain of our existing site. The existing site is www.fonts.com with the beta living at new.fonts.com. We do not want Google to crawl the new site until it's out of beta so we have added the following on all pages: However, one of our team members noticed that google is displaying results from new.fonts.com when doing an "site:new.fonts.com" search (see attached screenshot). Is it possible that Google is indexing the content despite the noindex, nofollow tags? We have double checked the syntax and it seems correct except the trailing "/". I know Google still crawls noindexed pages, however, the fact that they're showing up in search results using the site search syntax is unsettling. Any thoughts would be appreciated! DyWRP.png
Technical SEO | | ChrisRoberts-MTI0 -
404 errors on non-existent URLs
Hey guys and gals, First Moz Q&A for me and really looking forward to being part of the community. I hope as my first question this isn't a stupid one but I was just struggling to find any resource that dealt with the issue and am just looking for some general advice. Basically a client has raised a problem with 404 error pages - or the lack thereof- on non-existent URLs on their site; let's say for example: 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towels/asdfas' Obviously content never existed on this page so its not like you're saying 'hey, sorry this isn't here anymore'; its more like- 'there was never anything here in the first place'. Currently in this fictitious example typing in 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towels/asdfas**'** returns the same content as the 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towels' page which I appreciate isn't ideal. What I was wondering is how far do you take this issue- I've seen examples here on the seomoz site where you can edit the URI in a similar manner and it returns the same content as the parent page but with the alternate address. Should 404's be added across all folders on a site in a similar way? How often would this scenario be and issue particularly for internal pages two or three clicks down? I suppose unless someone linked to a page with a misspelled URL... Also would it be worth placing 301 redirects on a small number of common mis-spellings or typos e.g. 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towles' to the correct URLs as opposed to just 404s? Many thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | AJ2340