301ing 404's
-
Hey guys,
I am currently in the process of redirecting some of my 404 pages to pages like my home page.
Before I do that, I am assessing the link value of the 404 pages. My question is what do you do with the 404 pages which appear to have low quality links, do you really want to redirect them to an important page on your site?
What should I do with these 404 pages?
CheersAdam
-
This really depends...
If there is a traffic coming on the 404 pages and have a good link value in that case I would highly recommend redirecting 404 page to similar pages or home page but if the link value is not up to the mark then in that case I would recommend to create a sexy 404 page and let ht people land their and then manually move to any other part of the website...
A sexy 404 page will allow you to cater some natural links which might help you in the longer run!
-
In that case I'd just make a generic "404 Oops Page" and not worry about 301's on the low quality pages. Spend your time on more worthwhile efforts creating great content.
-
Thank Kade,
People are no longer searching for these pages - so its safe to just 301 them a page like the home page. But I'm worried about the quality of links which link to them. They are not bad sites, just low quality - make sense?
Cheers
-
If you are getting traffic from those 404's then there should be another page in your site that contains the content that is no longer found. 301 to pages that contain the content the visitor was originally looking for. If they felt the 404 page was worth visiting your site, they want to find the information they came looking for.
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
-
Does Title Tag location in a page's source code matter?
Currently our meta description is on line 8 for our page - http://www.paintball-online.com/Paintball-Guns-And-Markers-0Y.aspx The title tag, however sits below a bunch of code on line 237 Does the location of the title tag, meta tags, and any structured data have any influence with respect to SEO and search engines? Put another way, could we benefit from moving the title tag up to the top? I "surfed 'n surfed" and could not find any articles about this. I would really appreciate any help on this as our site got decimated organically last May and we are looking for any help with SEO. NIck
Technical SEO | | Istoresinc0 -
404 error - but I can't find any broken links on the referrer pages
Hi, My crawl has diagnosed a client's site with eight 404 errors. In my CSV download of the crawl, I have checked the source code of the 'referrer' pages, but can't find where the link to the 404 error page is. Could there be another reason for getting 404 errors? Thanks for your help. Katharine.
Technical SEO | | PooleyK0 -
Wordpress New Category URL's
Were just about to redesign our site and put all the blogs over to the new site. Previously most blogs have been added to the uncategorised section of the blog and I'm now weighing up the benefit of sifting through all the blogs and changing them to relevant categories. From an SEO perspective would it be better to Leave them in their current category but start afresh with all new blogs by adding them to relevant categories? Work out which blogs should go in which new category and 301 all previous URL's to the new one. Obviously number one will take a lot more time than number two.
Technical SEO | | acs1110 -
404 Error from site - is this normal?
I have been trying to clean up any 404 errors. We keep getting the following: URL /include/vdimgck.php referring domain http://www.856d.c@m/plus/feedback.php rendered domain unclickable by adding the "@" since I do not know if it is safe. I just turned off the trackbacks and pings in the blog since I saw it was producing duplicate content and from what I read it is not worth keeping those with Wordpress. is vdimgck.php anything some here instantly recognizes ? It tops all our 404 errors, seems like a lot of requests. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Force70 -
Webmaster tools lists a large number (hundreds)of different domains linking to my website, but only a few are reported on SEOMoz. Please explain what's going on?
Google's webmaster tools lists hundreds of links to my site, but SEOMoz only reports a few of them. I don't understand why that would be. Can anybody explain it to me? Is there someplace to I can go to alert SEOMoz to this issue?
Technical SEO | | dnfealkoff0 -
404 vs. 200?
Is it better to have an error page return a 404 or 200? If I change it to 200, will I still be able to see reports of 404's and/ or broken links? Is there a valid SEO reason that Google would have for not wanting error pages to return 200? In other words, is there any SEO reason to absolutely change it to return a 404? I would rather let it return 200 if no priority reason to change. [title edited by staff to provide clarity]
Technical SEO | | cindyt-170380 -
Slashes In Url's
If your cms has created two urls for the same piece of content that look like the following, www.domianname.com/stores and www.domianname.com/stores/, will this be seen as duplicate content by google? Your tools seem to pick it up as errors. Does one of the urls need 301 to the other to clear this up, or is it not a major problem? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | gregster10000 -
Site just will not be reincluded in Google's Index
I asked a question about this site (www.cookinggames.com.au) some time ago http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/38488/site-indexing-google-doesnt-like-it and had some very helpful answers which were great. However I'm still no further ahead. I have added some more content, submitted a new XML sitemap, removed the 'lorem ipsum...' Now it seems that even Bing have ditched the site too. The number 1 result in Australia for the search term 'cooking games' is now this one - http://www.cookinggames.net.au/ which surely is not so much better to deserve a #1 spot whilst my site is deindexed? I have just had another reconsideration request 'denied' and am absolutely out of ideas/. If anyone can help suggest what I need to do... or even suggest how I can get feedback from the search engines what's wring that would be fantastic. Thank you David
Technical SEO | | OzDave0