Will a large percentage of 404 links negatively impact SERP performance?
-
We discovered a broken link and issue with a dynamically generated sitemap that resulted in 9,000+ pages of duplicate content (namely there was not actual 404 page, but content for a 404 page that populated on the broken page).
We've corrected that issue so the 404 page is working correctly now and there aren't any more broken links on the site. However, we just reviewed our Google crawl report, and saw that now there are 9,000+ 404 links in the Google index.
We discovered the initial error when our SERP performance dropped 60% in a month.
Now that we've corrected all the duplicate content pages, will vast number of 404 pages negatively impact SERP results? If so, do you recommend doing 301 redirects to the page it should have gone to, and do you know of any automated tools performing the 301's (it's a standard HTML site, no CMS involved).
Thanks for your help!
-
Thanks for your response. Does it seem probable that this issue caused the 60% drop in SERP performance? The only other variable near the same time was changing hosting providers. We have moved to this provider for other clients, and never saw this kind of change, but that was usually at the beginning of the SEO campaign, not in the middle.
-
Give it a bit of time and it should fix itself. Google will crawl it and find that it is no longer broken.
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 showing my content on the serps in a different domain
Hi all, Recently a partner of ours discovered that Google is showing a meta description on the serps for his homepage that is not his but ours. On his site, he sells add-ons for our software, so the name of our software appears many times and as well there are many links pointing to our site. He claims he hasn´t copied this text from us, and I have used some tools to verify this. I don´t understand how Google can get confused and show our text as the meta desctiption on the serps for his homepage. Any idea on why this happened?
On-Page Optimization | | Paessler0 -
Ratio follow/nofollow outbound links
Dear all, So far, I couldn't find any satisfying answer to my problem - I hope you might be able to help: Due to the fact that our website consists of user-generated content, we've got many many outbound links to other sites. Until now, it was possible to assign a follow-attribute to these links. In the ages of "pandas" however, we realised we had to limit this possibility as well as the amount of outbound follow links already published. My question now is whether there is some kind of rule of thumb as to what ratio of outbound follow and nofollow links is advisable. I'd appreciate any ideas or comments. Thanks a lot!
On-Page Optimization | | Mulle0 -
Too many links on product pages
Hello, What do you do if there are too many links on product pages? With 18 products per page, there's 2 links per product for 120 links on many pages. There's 50 products in many categories, categories are at most 1 click from the home page. Should we use pagination or not? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Several Links in Some Pages
Dear all, Our main site is a bussiness directory, and following some SEO advices, we are creating landing pages for each category, in order to optimize them for the keywords. Those landing pages have links to the listings related to them. Using the same idea, we have created pages related to the regions, and those pages include links to the listings located in them. The only problem that I see with that, is the number of links that some categories or regions could have. Is there a limit of recomended number of links per page, from a SEO perspective? We also have a main category page, that includes a list of all categories, and this page could also have a relatively high number of links. The pages have around 300 to 500 words, some include also images, some include videos. Many thanks for your help, Daniel
On-Page Optimization | | te_c0 -
Excessive Internal Links & links to same location
Hi, When Google is counting internal links on a page and it comes across two links to the same url, do both of the links count towards Excessive Internal Links? The reason I ask is that on our website we allow users to navigate through the website in different ways (either by dropdown menus or side menu or through breadcrumbs); which cause some links to appear multiple times on the same page. Any thoughts? K.
On-Page Optimization | | soltec0 -
Internal linking best practice
See example: car rental - sedans - bmw car rental - sedans - audi car rental - sedans - ford (internal links to sedans - audi, ford) or (internal links to suv - bmw) car rental - suv - bmw car rental - suv - audi car rental - suv - ford (internal links to suv- audi, ford) or (internal links to sedans- bmw...) Should I cross link only between the product page under each category or can I link between different products under different categories? From a user point of view, I think it will give him more options if he wants to choose the same brand but a bigger vehicle although I have read numerous posts saying that we should be internally linking most of the time within the same category. User experience or SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | echo10 -
Linking Back to the Same Page
What are the other seo's opinions on linking the same keyword you are targeting lets take an example like Trampolines. So we have a Online shop selling trampolines would you feel it a good or bad thing to link the keyword trampolines from the homepage to the homepage almost creating a loop. Some SEO's say yes some say no ?
On-Page Optimization | | onlinemediadirect0