How to Destroy Old 404 Pages
-
Hello Mozzers,
So I just purchased a new domain and to my surprise it has a domain authority of 13 right out of the box (what luck!). I needed to investigate. To make a long story short the domain used to be home to a music blog that had hundreds of pages which of course are all missing now. I have about 400 pages on my hands that are resulting in a 404. How or what is the best method for eliminating these pages.
Does deleting the Crawl Errors in Google Webmaster Tools do anything?
Thanks
-
What a thorough response! I'm in the Option B scenario. The old content has nothing to do with my site so I don't need to redirect the old URLs. I will just wait out Google crawling those 404s.
Thanks!
-
You have a few options here. Option A is if you are going to build a site that will have similar topic based content as the old one and you want to use a larger portion of that domain authority from the old site to the new.
-
Pull those 404 errors from GWT in a spreadsheet. This gives you a corpus of links to work with.
-
Go into Bing WT and they have a way to browse what they have and had indexed. What is nice here is that Bing will tell you what URLs (even old 404s) have links to them.
-
Run your links through Open Site Explorer. You can then also get linking data, FB and Twitter data in addition to OSE data on the old URLs
-
If need be, run the more important dead URLs through the Wayback Machine http://archive.org/web/web.php you can now even see what the actual content was on the old URLs.
-
After doing all of this, pretty quick you should be able to see if there were any authority pages on the site that have now expired and you also know what those pages were about via the wayback machine.
-
On the authority pages, create new pages on the new site that have to do with the same topic, i.e. semantically related to the old page.
-
301 the old authority pages to the new authority pages.
-
The rest of the URLs you can just let them 404. They will continue to 404 several time until Google drops them. I would leave them in GWT as over time they should drop out as Google starts to ignore those pages, this may take a few months. You can then just check GWT for any new 404s that might show up from the new site and you need to deal with.
One thing to note on all of this. You may have to let the old sitemap 404 vs redirecting the sitemap.
http://moz.com/blog/how-to-fix-crawl-errors-in-google-webmaster-tools
"One frustrating thing that Google does is it will continually crawl old sitemaps that you have since deleted to check that the sitemap and URLs are in fact dead. If you have an old sitemap that you have removed from Webmaster Tools, and you don’t want being crawled, make sure you let that sitemap 404 and that you are not redirecting the sitemap to your current sitemap."
If you delete the 404s from GWT the next time Google spiders the old pages they will just show up again, up to you then.
Option B - if you dont care about the old pages, just let them 404 as mentioned above, but be aware of the issue with old sitemaps. You can check the Google index for old URLs in the SERPs or also if you look into GWT and look for data on your Search Traffic. Make sure that the old URLs are not showing up under your Search Queries.
-
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
-
301 Redirect to Home Page or Sub-Page?
What do you think about 301 redirect of good expired domain to a sub-page instead of the home page? I'm doing this so I don't hurt my brand name. Let me know your thoughts please. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JuanWork0 -
No designated 404 page, but any made-up URL path displays homepage Good / Bad?
I have a custom website where if you type in companyxyz.com/_any-made-up-url _it displays the homepage. So then you will see the homepage and in the URL bar the made up URL path remains visible "companyxyz.com/any-made-up-url" Is this good or bad or not an issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
I have a lot of spammy links coming to my 404 page (the URLs have been removed now). Should i re-direct to Home?
I have a lot of spammy links pointing at my website according to MOZ. Thankfully all of them were for some URLs that we've long since removed so they're hitting my 404. Should i change the 404 with a 301 and Re-Direct that Juice to my home page or some other page or will that hurt my ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jagdecat0 -
I have 2 keywords I want to target, should I make one page for both keywords or two separate pages?
My team sells sailboats and pontoon boats all over the country. So while they are both boats, the target market is two different types of people... I want to make a landing page for each state so if someone types in "Pontoon Boats for sale in Michigan" or "Pontoon boats for sale in Tennessee," my website will come up. But I also want to come up if someone is searching for sailboats for sale in Michigan or Tennessee (or any other state for that matter). So my question is, should I make 1 page for each state that targets both pontoon boats and sailboats (total of 50 landing pages), or should I make two pages for each state, one targeting pontoon boats and the other sailboats (total of 100 landing pages). My team has seen success targeting each state individually for a single keyword, but have not had a situation like this come up yet.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanMaster0 -
Best practice for retiring old product pages
We’re a software company. Would someone be able to help me with a basic process for retiring old product pages and re-directing the SEO value to new pages. We are retiring some old products to focus on new products. The new software has much similar functionality to the old software, but has more features. How can we ensure that the new pages get the best start in life? Also, what is the best way of doing this for users? Our plan currently is to: Leave the old pages up initially with a message to the user that the old software has been retired. There will also be a message explaining that the user might be interested in one of our new products and a link to the new pages. When traffic to these pages reduces, then we will delete these pages and re-direct them to the homepage. Has anyone got any recommendations for how we could approach this differently? One idea that I’m considering is to immediately re-direct the old product pages to the new pages. I was wondering if we could then provide a message to the user explaining that the old product has been retired but that the new improved product is available. I’d also be interested in pointing the re-directs to the new product pages that are most relevant rather than the homepage, so that they get the value of the old links. I’ve found in the past that old retirement pages for products can outrank the new pages as until you 301 them then all the links and authority flow to these pages. Any help would be very much appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
How to associate content on one page to another page
Hi all, I would like associate content on "Page A" with "Page B". The content is not the same, but we want to tell Google it should be associated. Is there an easy way to do this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Viewpoints1 -
Infographics and articles on the same page
Hi i'm currently designing an infographic and the infographic is based on a article my writer had created. I was thinking of ways in which i can add the article and infographic so they complement each other. Obviously the infographic is more in-depth then the article as it contains much more information. The infographic is designed to go viral. I was thinking of putting the info graphic on the top of the page and the written content below it. This way the person looking at the infographic can scroll down to find the more in-depth written discussion/article on the topic. Also from a SEO perspective, the search engines can index the written content (as it won't be able to index the the infographic since it's a image. What do you guys think is the best approach for this situation? Regards, Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mattcarter080 -
Will pages irrelevant to a site's core content dilute SEO value of core pages?
We have a website with around 40 product pages. We also have around 300 pages with individual ingredients used for the products and on top of that we have some 400 pages of individual retailers which stock the products. Ingredient pages have same basic short info about the ingredients and the retail pages just have the retailer name, adress and content details. Question is, should I add noindex to all the ingredient and or retailer pages so that the focus is entirely on the product pages? Thanks for you help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ArchMedia0