Please Help! Crawl & Site Errors - Will This Impact My SEO?
-
Hello Moz,
I need urgent help. I remove a tonne of product pages and put everything into one product page to deal with duplicate content. I thought this was a good thing to do until I got an email from Google saying:
"Googlebot identified a significant increase in the number of URLs on ****.com that return a 404 (not found) error. "
I checked it out and found the problem:
4 Soft 404's
41 Not Found'sWhat do I need to do to fix this? Is it a problem or should I just ignore? I removed all the pages on WordPress but I need to do it somehow manually through Google?
I have worked so hard on my SERP's that this will destroy me if I'm penalised. Please can someone advise?
-
First of all - don't stress out! You won't be penalized for broken links. Google penalizes for shady behavior, not honest mistakes.
Like Andrew said, make sure that you aren't linking to any of the pages you removed from your site, and that you've removed them from your XML sitemap.
Then you should be good!
Good luck,
Kristina
-
Don't stress everything is OK.
When google indexes your site it makes its own URL list. 404s in search console are just google saying 'hey I checked for this page from my list and it's gone'
Well that's fine. You deleted it so you already know it's gone. Google will keep checling for this page a few more times then it will deindex it. It just doesn't want to deindex without fair warning.
If these pages are still getting traffic however I would 301 them to a relevant page to maintain user experience.
Finally, if these pages targeted keywords you want to rank for. You will loose these rankings if you don't target them elsewhere.
-
I do yes but I must know how to deal with Google now as I am so stressed!
I thought deleting the pages would be fine? I don't understand what further I must do? Once you delete a page must you tell Google you have done so?
I only got the email yesterday so I assume I have sometime left to fix?
-
Do you have a decent 404 page? Does this facilitate further browsing.
Internal links that 404 will leak page rank. So you need to fix any internal 404s. Google says 404s in search console are not damaging but many people including myself see traffic bumps from resolving these with a 301.
Have you seen any drop in traffic or rankings.
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
-
Who is correct - please help!
I have a website with a lot of product pages - often thousands of pages. As each of these pages is for a specific lease car they are often only fractionally different from other pages. The urls are too long, the H1 is often too long and the Title is often too long for "SEO best practice". And they do create duplication issues according to MOZ. Some people tell me to change them to noindex/nofollow whilst others tell me to leave them as they are as best not to hide from google crawler. Any advice will be gratefully received. Thanks for listening.
Technical SEO | | jlhitch0 -
SEO impact of the anatomy of URL subdirectory structure?
I've been pushing hard to get our Americas site (DA 34) integrated with our higher domain authority (DA 51) international website. Currently our international website is setup in the following format... website.com/us-en/ website.com/fr-fr/ etc... The problem that I am facing is that I need my development framework installed in it's own directory. It cannot be at the root of the website (website.com) since that is where the other websites (us-en, fr-fr, etc.) are being generated from. Though we will have control of /us-en/ after the integration I cannot use that as the website main directory since the americas website is going to be designed for scalability (eventually adopting all regions and languages) so it cannot be region specific. What we're looking at is website.com/[base]/us-en. I'm afraid that if base has any length to it in terms of characters it is going to dilute the SEO value of whatever comes after it in the URL (website.com/[base]/us-en/store/product-name.html). Any recommendations?
Technical SEO | | bearpaw0 -
Unnatural links to your site--impacts links
Hi, I just recive a "nice" Massage at my WMT- Unnatural links to your site—impacts links _Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. Learn more._Did someone here came across any massage like this before?if so, any suggestion on what to so next?Whould love for some help! Thanks
Technical SEO | | Tit0 -
Can anyone help me understand why google is "Not Selecting" a large number of my webpages to include when crawling my site.
When looking through my google webmaster tools, I clicked into the advanced settings under index status and was surprised to see that google has marked around 90% of my pages on my site as "Not Selected" when crawling. Please take a look and offer any suggestions. www.luxuryhomehunt.com
Technical SEO | | Jdubin0 -
Will removing the main nav from the homepage penalize the site?
I have a client who offers residential and commercial services. We are dividing up the site into two sections that distinguish between these services and the clients. On the homepage, we ask site visitors to first choose from the Commercial or Residential services. I don't want to have any main navigation options on the homepage because they will change depending on whether you select the commercial option or the residential. Will this hurt the site in terms of SEO? Are there any suggestions of how to structure the home nav so it is not confusing to the visitor, but won't hurt the optimization of the site? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | WebsightDesign0 -
Most Common Errors & Warnings
Hello there, i would like to ask some basic tips.. regarding found common errors & Warnings. list : Tittle Element Too Long
Technical SEO | | Bretly
Duplicate Page Content
and Duplicate Page Tittle. how could i fixed this one? any help would be greatly appreciated regards,0 -
Google Crawler Error / restricting crawling
Hi On a Magento Instance we manage there is an advanced search. As part of the ongoing enhancement of the instance we altered the advance search options so there are less and more relevant. The issue is Google has crawled and catalogued the advanced search with the now removed options in the query string. Google keeps crawling these out of date advanced searches. These stale searches now create a 500 error. Currently Google is attempting to crawl these pages twice a day. I have implemented the following to stop this:- 1. Submitted requested the url be removed via Webmaster tools, selecting the directory option using uri: http://www.domian.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/ 2. Added Disallow to robots.txt Disallow: /catalogsearch/advanced/result/* Disallow: /catalogsearch/advanced/result/ 3. Add rel="nofollow" to the links in the site linking to the advanced search. Below is a list of the links it is crawling or attempting to crawl, 12 links crawled twice a day each resulting in a 500 status. Can anything else be done? http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=94&category=55&color_layered=128&csize[0]=0&fabric=92&inventry_status=97&length=0&price=5%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=115&category=55&color_layered=130&csize[0]=0&fabric=0&inventry_status=97&length=116&price=3%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=94&category=55&color_layered=126&csize[0]=0&fabric=92&inventry_status=97&length=0&price=5%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=137&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=8%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=142&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=4%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=137&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=5%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=142&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=5%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=135&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=5%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=128&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=5%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=127&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=4%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=127&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=3%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=128&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=10%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=122&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=8%2C10
Technical SEO | | Flipmedia1120 -
What is SEO impact of redirecting from domain to https appspot domain ?
Our site is hosted on google and is fully https. But since google's limitation is that all https needs to be on the appspot domain, we are redirecting users from our website to the appspot domain. What is the impact of this on SEO?
Technical SEO | | incandescent0