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
-
Odd 404 pages
Evening all, I've performed a Screaming Frog technical crawl of a site, and it's returning links like this as 404s: http://clientsite.co.uk/accidents-caused-by-colleagues/js/modernizr-2.0.6.min.js Now, I recognise that Modernizr is used for detecting features in the user's browser - but why would it have created an indexed page that no longer exists? Would you leave them as is? 410 them? Or do something else entirely? Thanks for reading, I look forward to hearing your thoughts! Kind regards, John.
Technical SEO | | Muhammad-Isap0 -
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 -
Need help with home page on site
Hello! Thanks for reading in advance! I've got a relatively old site (12 year old domain) that has experienced a drop in rankings specifically for our home page. Some of the key terms that I'd assume we would rank well for are: "expedite us passport" According to SEOMOZ, our on page optimization receives a C for the termr. also, the root domain and page have decent links, etc. However; looking at Google (logged out and in incognito mode in chrome), a page on our site http://www.passportsandvisas.com/passport/index.asp ranks well and our HOME page isn't listed in the top 50 or 100. THis is the case for a lot of keywords we used to rank well for. I would have thought our home page would have at least outranked an internal page. Any thoughts would be very, very helpful!
Technical SEO | | santiago230 -
Robots.txt issue - site resubmission needed?
We recently had an issue when a load of new files were transferred from our dev server to the live site, which unfortunately included the dev site's robots.txt file which had a disallow:/ instruction. Bad! Luckily I spotted it quickly and the file has been replaced. The extent of the damage seems to be that some descriptions aren't displaying and we're getting a message about robots.txt in the SERPs for a few keywords. I've done a site: search and generally it seems to be OK for 99% of our pages. Our positions don't seem to be affected right now but obviously it's not great for the CTRs on those keywords affected. My question is whether there is anything I can do to bring the updated robots.txt file to Google's attention? Or should we just wait and sit it out? Thanks in advance for your answers!
Technical SEO | | GBC0 -
Does it really matter to set 301 redirect for not found error pages?
I've very simple question for not found error pages. Does it really require to set up 301 redirect for all not found error pages which detected in Google webmaster tools? Honestly, I don't want to set 301 redirect exclude externally connected pages. So, what will impact on ranking after follow this process?
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Redirect from old wordpress site to new php site? Best approach
Hi I have two websites one legacy site done in wordpress the other in php. However I would like to merge the two together and remove the wordpress site. However it has a good link profile and the pages rank well. What is the best approach to do a 301 redirect from the old site with all its pages pointing to the homepage of the new site? If so what's the best way to do this in wordpress? Many thanks
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
Help changing category and page titles on established Magento site.
Hi All, This is my first post, I've been a Pro member for a while now, read many posts but have never asked a question here. I have an established Magento site that I need to do a lot of SEO work on. I am a newbie at SEO, so I wanted to ask for advice here. I just changed one of the category names, the url, meta title, and meta description. When making the change I selected the checkbox in the Magento backend that says "Create Permanent Redirect for Old URL" Example:
Technical SEO | | TrulyLuna
Old Category: http://www.domain.com/old-category-name.html
New Category: http://www.domain.com/new-category-name.html Everything worked fine with the exception of one alarming thing... I lost all of the page authority for the category itself and all of the sub categories and pages below it. Now the category and all pages below it show (on the moz toolbar) a PA of 1 and 0 links and 0 domains. I updated the sitemap. I did not do a 301 redirect in the .htaccess, I only chose the option to redirect on the Magento backend when changing the name and url of the category. I need to change a lot of other category and page names and urls but now I'm a bit gun shy, as I do not want to do something that will damage what little page rank I have at the moment. I'm looking for some advice from one of you guys who might be able to help me do this the correct way. I did some research on Google, but I'm still not sure of the correct method to accomplish this. Thanks in advance for any help that you can offer.0 -
SEOMoz Crawl Diagnostic indicates duplicate page content for home page?
My first SEOMoz Crawl Diagnostic report for my website indicates duplicate page content for my home page. It lists the home page URL Page Title and URL twice. How do I go about diagnosing this? Is the problem related to the following code that is in my .htaccess file? (The purpose of the code was to redirect any non "www" backlink referrals to the "www" version of the domain.) RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^whatever.com [NC]
Technical SEO | | Linesides
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.whatever.com/$1 [L,R=301] Should I get rid of the "http" reference in the second line? Related to this is a notice in the "Crawl Notices Found" -- "301 Permanent redirect" which shows my home page title as "http://whatever.com" and shows the redirect address as http://http://www.whatever.com/ I'm guessing this problem is again related to the redirect code I'm using. Also... The report indicates duplicate content for those links that have different parameters added to the URL i.e. http://www.whatever.com?marker=Blah Blah&markerzoom=13 If I set up a canonical reference for the page, will this fix this? Thank you.0
