Managing 404 errors
-
What is the best way to manage 404 errors for pages that are no longer on the server.
For example, client deletes old site from server and replaces it with new site. Webmaster tools is reporting 100 + 404 errors form the old site. I've blocked the 404 pages with robot.text. Requested removal in google webmaster tools. And created a custom 404 page - http://www.tvsphoto.com/missingurlexample
Is there anything else I can do?
-
Thanks!
I've got one in place
Example:
I fairly sure its set up correctly
-
If possible you can list pages that have similar URLs on your 404 page. Some CMSs can help you do this. WordPress certainly comes to mind.
-
Also, be sure to have a user friendly 404 page. 404 is unavoidable due to typos, silliness and random acts of God, so it's always wise to have a highly functional page as a catchall for anything that you can't 301 redirect.
Examples
http://www.apple.com/gljasdlj
http://pages.ebay.com/gljasdlj
http://www.cnn.com/gljasdlj -
Thank again Barry, Very Helpful!
-
301 redirect them to their new page location.
EDIT: To clarify, there are probably some links coming in to those pages or there are new page equivilents that could better serve customers.
If there's definitely no match then I'd still consider redirecting them to the home page (or even a custom landing page, rather than the custom 404 page) to preserve as much link juice as possible.
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 Webmaster tools -Fixing over 20,000+ crawl errors
Hi, I'm trying to gather all the 404 crawl errors on my website after a recent hacking that I've been trying to rectify and clean up. Webmaster tools states that I have over 20 000+ crawl errors. I can only download a sample of 1000 errors. Is there any way to get the full list instead of correcting 1000 errors, marking them as fixed and waiting for the next batch of 1000 errors to be listed in Webmaster tools? The current method is quite timely and I want to take care of all errors in one shot instead of over a course of a month.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPK0 -
18,000 'Title Element is too Long' Errors
How detrimental is this in the overall SEO scheme of things? Having checked 3 of our main competitors, they too seem to have similar issues... I am trying to look at a solution but it is proving very difficult! Thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomKing0 -
404 in Google cache for one of my blog posts
Hey Moz People, I'm getting a 404 when I cache: this blog post http://www.inscopix.com/blog/decoding-brain-initiative and I'm not able to see what's causing it. Can someone take a look and let me know if they see anything standing out? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jacobfy0 -
Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?
Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this. When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost? We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name). Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
What do do when sidebar is causing "Too Many On-Page Links" error
I have been going through all the errors, warnings from my weekly SEO Moz scans. One thing I'm see a bit of is "Too Many On-Page Links". I've only seen a few, but as in the case of this one: http://blog.mexpro.com/5-kid-friendly-cancun-mexico-resorts there is only 2 links on the page (the image and the read more). So I think the sidebar links are causing the error. I feel my tags are important to help readers find information they may be looking for. Is there a better method to present tags than the wordpress tag cloud? Should I exclude the tags, with the risk of making things more difficult for my users? Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Robots.txt error message in Google Webmaster from a later date than the page was cached, how is that?
I have error messages in Google Webmaster that state that Googlebot encountered errors while attempting to access the robots.txt. The last date that this was reported was on December 25, 2012 (Merry Christmas), but the last cache date was November 16, 2012 (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.etundra.com/robots.txt&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a). How could I get this error if the page hasn't been cached since November 16, 2012?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eTundra0 -
Wordpress No 404
Hello, My issue is that in wordpress 404 does not seem to be working properly. An example of this is: sitename.com/category/catname loads the files in that category but I can also type sitename.com/category/asdasfaasd/catname and it still goes to the posts in that category and does not 404. I can replace the misc text with anything and it does not 404. My worry is that this can be used to exploit duplicate content. I've looked at a couple of other sites and they do the same. I'm using Yoast as my SEO plugin and my theme is elogix from themeforest. I've tried disabling all plugins, cloudflare and changing theme and the same issue exists. If anyone can help it would be extremely appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LukeHutchinson0 -
The system shows duplicate content for the same page (main domain and index.html). Is this an error of SEOMOZ?
Should I be worried that this will affect SEO? Most sites redirect to the index.html page, right? [edited by staff to remove toolbar data]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moskowman0