Do I need to worry about these 404s after changing permalinks structure?
-
Not long ago I wanted to change the permalink structure on a blog where the full date was included in the post urls to one where it was just /category/blog-post-title. The site is on a managed host and they setup the redirects for me and then I changed the permalink structure in the WP settings. Everything worked fine after and all old posts now redirect to the new structure.
However in Google search console I can see that my 404s report has jumped from a few hundred to several thousands but it seems to be counting the urls paths to elements such as images within the old posts permalink structure eg
/2012/6/some-post/some-image-in-post
all the old posts themselves and their content redirects fine though.
Do I need to worry about these 404s? It annoys me to see so many in my reports like that even if they aren't hurting my site
-
Hi Mark,
Have you figured out if the URLs that are 404'ing are still mentioned somewhere. Either in the canonical tags or somewhere else or that something is wrong with the redirects?
Martijn.
-
So, a 404 won't affect your overall SEO. It may affect usability if your higher traffic pages are resulting in an error. Obviously if it's images only, then that's less of a concern unless you were driving lots of traffic via image search.
Generally if you redirect everything, then the image links should be updated to (I did the same thing on one of my own sites fairly recently). But it may simply be Search Console lagging behind a bit... It's annoying if you want to have no errors on your reports (and I get bugged by the same thing sometimes, even on sites with 100s of thousands of pages), but as long as the posts are working fine, I wouldn't worry too much.
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
-
Best site Template, Structure, etc. for SEO
If I were to spin up a new site what do people recommend as the best template, services, etc. Do you have an example of the perfect structure, I want to point my team to an example page and say - This is perfect, do this but for our product (structure, content amount, etc) Thank you,
On-Page Optimization | | Jamesmcd030 -
SEO Onpage (where I need to put the H1/2/3)?
Hi everybody, I'm working on my new website, and I have a few questions about the Headers (<h 1="" 2="" 3="">)
On-Page Optimization | | JohnPalmer
please see the attached image, I create a mock-up for you, please tell me which H I have to put on the title.
(** most of the articles will be without sub-titles so...it will be dynamic, but try to take a look on the "sidebar" and "menu link".</h> 6ER0EpK0 -
Best practice for URL structure - short and sweet, or double keyword?
We are just about to re-jig our main category pages and have found that different leading sites have taking different views on short and sweet url structure vs. repeated keywords1. For our website we have two options. We have two options: mywebsite.com/browse/birmingham/restaurants-in-birmingham or mywebsite.com/browse/birmingham/restaurants Someone like opentable have gone for short and sweet (opentable.co.uk/birmingham-restaurants) whereas people like Time Out have gone longer with multiple matches in the url (timeout.com/london/food-drink/londons-top-50-restaurants). Is there a consensus on which is better?
On-Page Optimization | | HireSpace0 -
In need of guidance on keyword targeting
Hello I'm in need of some guidance as my head has gotten into a spin. Here's the website - www.onsite-sm.co.uk
On-Page Optimization | | Hughescov
Here's the keywords - concrete repair, concrete repairs, concrete repair contractors
Here's the question - The homepage doesn't really rank for anything specific and the concrete repair page isn't really strong enough to rank for the above keywords. What should I do? Thanks for any help.0 -
How to avoid duplicates when URL and content changes during the course of a day?
I'm currently facing the following challenge: Newspaper industry: the content and title of some (featured) articles change a couple of times during a normal day. The CMS is setup so each article can be found by only using it's specific id (eg. domain.tld/123). A normal article looks like this: domain.tld/some-path/sub-path/i-am-the-topic,123 Now the article gets changed and with it the topic. It looks like this now: domain.tld/some-path/sub-path/i-am-the-new-topic,123 I can not tell the writers that they can not change the article as they wish any more. I could implement canonicals pointing to the short url (domain.tld/123). I could try to change the URL's to something like domain.tld/some-path/sub-path/123. Then we would lose keywords in URL (which afaik is not that important as a ranking factor; rather as a CTR factor). If anyone has experiences sharing them would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Jan
On-Page Optimization | | jmueller0 -
Which permalink structure should i use
Hi Im using wordpress for a trading market update site so most of the posts i add are time relevant... What permalink structure is best to use? Just /postname/ or /year/month/postname/ Thanks in advance! Chris
On-Page Optimization | | chrisleonard0 -
Changing domain name
Hello, we have 10 websites in same niche, and plan to build one strong site by making a 301 redirect from all sites to one. We think to do redirect each site to subfolder like this: www.newdomain.com/site1 www.newdomain.com/site2 www.newdomain.com/site3 www.newdomain.com/site4 www.newdomain.com/site5 www.newdomain.com/site6 www.newdomain.com/site7 www.newdomain.com/site8 www.newdomain.com/site9 www.newdomain.com/site10 And in root domain place unique content updated daily. Is this would work? Or this is bad idea? Looking to hear from a qualified technicians advice. Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | bele0 -
Does having a "+" in a URL hurt SEO? Would much value be gained changing it to a hyphen?
There's a site that contains "+" signs in the URL in order to call different information for the content on the page. Would it be better to change those to hyphens (-), or not that much value will be gained, so leave them as is? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | MitchellStoker0