Do sites really need a 404 page?
-
We have people posting broken links to our site is this looking us link juice as they link to 404 pages. We could redirect to the homepage or just render the home page content, in both cases we can still display a clear page not found message. Is this legal (white hat).
-
Also, some site owners will run link checking tools on their sites that look at their off-site links and see if any return 404s. If you're not returning a 404, the site owners may not know (via an automated tool) that the link is broken.
-
Thanks this was what I thought, as all the reputable sites have them.
-
Yes, you should have a real 404 page.
- You'll help the people that follow their links - you should have a list of links that they might be looking for - and a search box. Remember, you want these visitors to stay on your site, not bounce.
- Google wants you to have one. In fact many bots will test your site has a 404 page that returns the correct status (404 of course). Make sure you test yours. Many incorrectly return 200 (ok) status.
If you want to keep (some of) the linkjuice, and you know where they want to go, you would 301 redirect to the correct destination.
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
-
Main Site and eCommerce Site URLs for SEO
My client currently has a main website on a url and an eCommerce site on a subdomain. The eCommerce site is currently not mobile friendly, has images that are too small and are problematic - and I believe it negates some of the SEO work we do for them. I had to turn off Google Shopping ads because the quality score was so low. That being said, they are rebuilding a shopping cart on a new platform that will be mobile friendly BUT the images are going to be tiny until they slowly replace images over several months. Would you keep the shopping cart on a subdomain, or make it part of the main website URL? Can it negatively impact the progress we have made on the main site SEO.
Technical SEO | | jerrico10 -
Error 404, Wordpress adds the domain automaticly to the end of the pages, WHY?
Hello guys, I'm using wordpress and the Yoast to help me improve my SEO. Everything went well except for today because "Moz" found 404 errors when scrolling the website saying showing the domain of my website at the end of 12 url. For example :
Technical SEO | | abonnisseau
www.domain.com/service-1/www.domain.com www.domain.com/contact-page/**www.domain.com ** Do you have any idea where does that come from ? Thanks Alex0 -
Help with site structure needed - any assistance welcomed!
Hi all, I am currently tasked with finding a better way to optimise our website ukdocumentstorage dot com. For starters, I would like to know what our site structure actually is at present. So I would like to be able to see which pages are linking to what at the moment & which pages have broken links on which I need to remove from the content. Hopefully I'd then be able to tidy up any errors that the site already has in its internal linking. Is there a way to do this easily? Or to have a graphical representation of the sites structure? I have just signed into our Webmaster Tools account and I am faced with a list of 10 'Crawl Errors' which are all 404 errors. Some of them do not actually exist anymore, but are still being linked to from a few pages according to WMT. For example, /industries_served_legal.htm is still being linked to from 5 of our pages (including /industries_served_local_authority.htm) However, this doesn't seem to be a case at all on the page as I can't find a link to /industries_served_legal.htm on /industries_served_local_authority.htm. Any advice as to why this is happening? Is there a way to find out easily where these broken links are situated on the page? And if I do actually manage to find our broken links, how would I go about removing them? The page /document_security.htm doesn't exist in our Sitewizard list of pages anymore, yet still exists online. How do I go about deleting this unecessary page properly? And does this harm our rankings? The document_security page also has an extra link on the top toolbar to a Document Management page, an addition which is no longer present on our up to date pages. Now this page (and the extra dropdown page when you hover over it) still exist on our list of Sitewizard pages at the moment, but we obviously no longer want to have these online anymore. How should I remove these? I understand that this is a lot of information, and so I would appreciate any help that can be given on these! Many thanks
Technical SEO | | janc0 -
Really stuck guys. how do you earn links for an ecommerce site?
Hi seomoz guys So I read a lot on seomoz and other sites, and see a lot of info about earning links, but this all seems to be aimed at blogs and brochure sites. Being blunt, we sell stuff. Our competitors sell the same stuff. We are limited on what we can do product description content wise as our suppliers expect us to use the content they supply. We are now putting together q and a pages based on a great article in the seomoz blog. Does anyone have any great ideas for developing link bait or just getting links to an eCommerce site? We know our service is good, and our product is good, but that's not enough to convince someone to link to us. Help Thanks Paul
Technical SEO | | TheUniqueSEO0 -
Why would SEOMoz and GWT report 404 errors for pages that are not 404ing?
Recently, I've noticed that nearly all of the 404 errors (not soft 404) reported in GWT actually resolve to a legitimate page. This was weird, but I thought it might just be old info, so I would go through the process of checking and "mark as fixed" as necessary. However, I noticed that SEOMoz is picking up on these 404 errors in the diagnostics of the site as well, and now I'm concerned with what the problem could be. Anyone have any insight into this? Rich
Technical SEO | | secretstache0 -
ECommerce site - Duplicate pages problem.
We have an eCommerce site with multiple products being displayed on a number of pages. We use rel="next" and rel="prev" and have a display ALL which I understand Google should automatically be able to find. Should we also being using a Canonical tag as well to tell google to give authority to the first page or the All Pages. Or was the use of the next and prev rel tags that we currently do adequate. We currently display 20 products per page, we were thinking of increasing this to make fewer pages but they would be better as this which would make some later product pages redundant . If we add 301 redirects on the redundant pages, does anyone know of the sort of impact this might cause to traffic and seo ?. General thoughts if anyone has similar problems welcome
Technical SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
For large sites, best practices for pages hidden behind internal search?
If a website has 1M+ pages, with most of them being hidden behind an internal search, what's the best way to get pages included in an engine's index? Does a direct clickpath to those pages need to exist from the homepage or other major hub pages on the site? Is submitting an XML sitemap enough?
Technical SEO | | vlevit0
