Do Google penalise you for having too many 404's?
-
Hi There
I have been doing some work reducing the number of 404's displayed in the Crawl Errors found in Googles Webmaster Tools.
We had a lot of products that were no longer available so have now been removed to reduce the number of 404s that had been found.
However, there are a number of URLs that have been crawled that do not exist on our website and have been flagged in the list of Crawl Errors. I want to know if Google will penalise us for this, perhaps affecting our quality score or if they can see that this is something out of our control.
This site for example: http://sibd.com/com_offers_unique_gifts.html has generated a lot of truncated URLs on its site that link to pages that don't exist on our site: http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/pri… That is the exact link that it is trying to locate.
Here is the report for that particular link. As you can see the content has been scraped by other sites which has spread the problem further.
Pages that link to http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/pri..
URL Discovery Date
http://www.justsearchit.com.au/for_flowers_offers,3.html
Sep 12, 2011
http://sibd.com/offers_unique_gifts_for.html
Sep 11, 2011
http://sibd.com/offers_unique_gifts.html
Sep 11, 2011
http://sibd.com/com_offers_unique_gifts_for.html
Sep 11, 2011
http://www.flexfinder.com/flowers_offers_unique_gifts.html
Sep 10, 2011
http://sibd.com/offers_unique_gifts_with.html
Sep 10, 2011
http://sibd.com/com_offers_unique_gifts.html
Sep 10, 2011
http://sibd.com/of_flowers_offers_from.html
Sep 9, 2011
http://arama.frmpc.com/for_flowers_for_less_ltd_includes.html
Sep 9, 2011
http://arama.frmpc.com/flowers_for_less_than_do.html
Sep 9, 2011I have spotted a lot of these and currently have around 3.3K 404s in total, a majority are from sites we don't control.
Is there an acceptable number of 404s a site should aim for and is the above something we should address or are Google smart enough to work out that we can't fix this ourselves?
Thanks!
Sam.
-
use a link checker to figure all the links that are 404.
use mod rewrite to send them to the home page or a given page when the one requested is not found.
google mod rewrite if you dont know wjhat it is
-
Hey Sam,
I believe this can adversely effect your overall site rankings, not due to penalties from the 404's themselves, but due to the assumed high bounce rate on those pages - which is going to increase your site's overall average bounce rate - which Google will attribute to the value of your website's content.
Just as Manischa said, I would 301 these pages to functioning content pages if you do not plan on resurrecting them, and if you do I would use a 302 (temporary redirect) until you have the content back up on those pages at which point you remove the temporary redirect status.
Hope this helps.
-Nick
-
I have had similar problems (although with fewer pages), and did not notice a negative effect. If you can, I would still try to 301 redirect the URLs these pages point to to real pages. This will also help users which might click on one of the links (but does anyone click on the links from these scraper pages? I have never seen anything in my referrals...)
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
-
Google is reporting a server error, but there's no server error.
Google is erroneously reporting a server error and I just can't figure out the source of the issue. My links work, and GoDaddy ensures me there is no server error. This issue arose when I moved from HTTP to HTTPS and CPanel hosting, but I've got no idea how to fix it. I thought maybe I have duplicate content, but it does not appear that way. Any suggestions? I'm at a loss. www.thedishmaster.com
Reporting & Analytics | | TheDishmaster0 -
WMT and 'Links To Your Site'
Anyone else find that there are, almost continually, links added to the 'Links To Your Site' list from years ago that weren't previously reflected? I'm seeing links that were added to directories in 2008 (by whoever was doing the SEO then) only showing in the last week or so when these links weren't in the list a few months ago. I don't suppose there's much I can do - it's just annoying in that it adds to more people to contact to have nonsense removed.
Reporting & Analytics | | Martin_S0 -
Google Analytics
Hi I added one google analytics account with a third party business as an admin, and I accidentally shared all the accounts of my clients. So this business have access to all my google analytics account. How do I remove them as an admin of all the GA accounts except the one they need? A step by step process is welcomed 🙂 Thank you,
Reporting & Analytics | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
What impact will Google's 10/18/2011 announcement of 'Making Search More Secure' have on the ability to track specific keyword queries via Analytics?
The full announcement is here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-secure.html My concern is that the ability for Google Analytics to parse information on specific keyword queries will be diminished. The article hints that Google Webmaster Tools will be exempt from the problem, and I've never relied on Webmaster tools as a go-to for tying specific keyword queries to Goal Tracking (form submissions and sales). The community's thoughts on this one are appreciated. 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | MKR_Agency0 -
Google Analytics' Goals and Cold Fusion
We are having an issue tracking goal completions in GA with a cold fusion site. I would like to know if anyone as had similar issues and found a solution.
Reporting & Analytics | | JamesBarry0 -
Phantom urls causing 404
I have a very strange problem. When I run SEOmoz diagnostics on my site, it reveals urls that I never created. It seems to combine two slugs into a new url. For example, I have created the pages http://www.naplesrealestatestars.com/abaco-bay-condos-naples/ and http://www.naplesrealestatestars.com/beachwalk-naples-florida/ and now the url http://www.naplesrealestatestars.com/abaco-bay-condos-naples/beachwalk-naples-florida/ exists in addition to the two I created. There are over 100 of these phantom urls and they all show a 404 error when clicked on or crawled by SEOmoz. Any body know how to correct this?
Reporting & Analytics | | DanBoyle760 -
Use SEOmoz API in Google Docs Spreadsheet
Hi, Has anyone made functions to get link metrics from SEOmoz API in Google docs spreadsheet? Page Authority Domain Authority Linking Root Domains Total Links _Thanks to Tom Critchlow I got the social metrics, now I just need the ones from SEOmoz api. _ Any help would be sweet.
Reporting & Analytics | | EdgySEO0 -
Links and index missing from Google Webmaster Tools!
I've been using a wordpress blog and using google analytics and webmaster tools. I'd never done very much optimizing of my site, my strategy had always been to just keep writing relevant posts and let google do the rest. At some point I installed a SEO plugin to wordpress and did a tiny amount of tweaking, but I noticed that in my webmaster tools page, all my "links to this site" links are gone! My site map says 42 pages submitted, 42 pages indexed, but all the links that I've built over the past few years are missing, and I also notice that I can't find my main landing page in the index anymore. I know there are indexed sites out there that link to me, but they aren't being reflected anymore. Did I anger google by using SEO plugins within wordpress? I'm fairly certain I wasn't doing anything sketchy. Http://brodiegraphics.com RTOH6.png
Reporting & Analytics | | HELPeR0