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
-
Best practices for retiring 100s of blog posts?
Hi. I wanted to get best practices for retiring an enterprise blog with hundreds of old posts with subject matter that won't be repurposed. What would be the best course of action to retire and maintain the value of any SEO authority from those old blog pages? Is it enough to move those old posts into an archive subdirectory and Google would deprioritize those posts over time? Or would a mass redirect of old blog posts to the new blog's home page be allowed (even though the old blog post content isn't being specifically replaced)? Or would Google basically say that if there aren't 1:1 replacement URLs, that would be seen as soft-404s and treated like a 404?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | David_Fisher0 -
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 is Google Webmaster Tools showing 404 Page Not Found Errors for web pages that don't have anything to do with my site?
I am currently working on a small site with approx 50 web pages. In the crawl error section in WMT Google has highlighted over 10,000 page not found errors for pages that have nothing to do with my site. Anyone come across this before?
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
Duplicate Content Issues on Product Pages
Hi guys Just keen to gauge your opinion on a quandary that has been bugging me for a while now. I work on an ecommerce website that sells around 20,000 products. A lot of the product SKUs are exactly the same in terms of how they work and what they offer the customer. Often it is 1 variable that changes. For example, the product may be available in 200 different sizes and 2 colours (therefore 400 SKUs available to purchase). Theese SKUs have been uploaded to the website as individual entires so that the customer can purchase them, with the only difference between the listings likely to be key signifiers such as colour, size, price, part number etc. Moz has flagged these pages up as duplicate content. Now I have worked on websites long enough now to know that duplicate content is never good from an SEO perspective, but I am struggling to work out an effective way in which I can display such a large number of almost identical products without falling foul of the duplicate content issue. If you wouldnt mind sharing any ideas or approaches that have been taken by you guys that would be great!
Technical SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
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 -
Are 404 Errors a bad thing?
Good Morning... I am trying to clean up my e-commerce site and i created a lot of new categories for my parts... I've made the old category pages (which have had their content removed) "hidden" to anyone who visits the site and starts browsing. The only way you could get to those "hidden" pages is either by knowing the URLS that I used to use or if for some reason one of them is spidering in Google. Since I'm trying to clean up the site and get rid of any duplicate content issues, would i be better served by adding those "hidden" pages that don't have much or any content to the Robots.txt file or should i just De-activate them so now even if you type the old URL you will get a 404 page... In this case, are 404 pages bad? You're typically not going to find those pages in the SERPS so the only way you'd land on these 404 pages is to know the old url i was using that has been disabled. Please let me know if you guys think i should be 404'ing them or adding them to Robots.txt Thanks
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Do we need to manually submit a sitemap every time, or can we host it on our site as /sitemap and Google will see & crawl it?
I realized we don't have a sitemap in place, so we're going to get one built. Once we do, I'll submit it manually to Google via Webmaster tools. However, we have a very dynamic site with content constantly being added. Will I need to keep manually re-submitting the sitemap to Google? Or could we have the continually updating sitemap live on our site at /sitemap and the crawlers will just pick it up from there? I noticed this is what SEOmoz does at http://www.seomoz.org/sitemap.
Technical SEO | | askotzko0 -
Why are old versions of images still showing for my site in Google Image Search?
I have a number of images on my website with a watermark. We changed the watermark (on all of our images) in May, but when I search for my site getmecooking in Google Image Search, it still shows the old watermark (the old one is grey, the new one is orange). Is Google not updating the images its search results because they are cached in Google? Or because it is ignoring my images, having downloaded them once? Should we be giving our images a version number (at the end of the file name)? Our website cache is set to 7 days, so that's not the issue. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Techboy0