Please Help! Crawl & Site Errors - Will This Impact My SEO?

[crocman]

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's

What 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?

[KristinaKledzik]

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

[Andrew-SEO]

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.

[crocman]

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?

[Andrew-SEO]

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.