Do I need a canonical tag on the 404 error page?
-
Per definition, a 404 is displayed for different url (any not existing url ...).
As I try to clean my website following SEOmoz pro advices, SEOmoz notify me of duplicate content on urls leading to a 404
This is I guess not that important, but just curious: should we add a cononical tag to the template returning the 404, with a canonical url such as www.mysite.com/404
?
-
You will see that in GWT. Go to GWT > Crawler Access > Remove URL. It'll de-index that 404.
-
Stephen is right; there's no need for that. It's a little odd it's telling you that, I would check that these URLs that are 404ing are returning a status code of 404.
-
no need for that ^^
I assume you no longer link to those 404 pages from your website? So on the next crawl SEOmoz wont pick up those 404s
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
-
Canonical tag on a large site
when would you reccomend using a canonical tag on a large site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cristiana.Solinas0 -
Spammy page with canonical reference to my website
A potentially spammy website http://www.rofof.com/ has included a rel canonical tag pointing to my website. They've included the tag on thousands of pages on their website. Furthermore http://www.rofof.com/ appears to have backlinks from thousands of other low-value domains For example www.kazamiza.com/vb/kazamiza242122/, along with thousands of other pages on thousands of other domains all link to pages on rofof.com, and the pages they link to on rofof.com are all canonicalized to a page on my site. If Google does respect the canonical tag on rofof.com and treats it as part of my website then the thousands of spammy links that point to rofof.com could be considered as pointing to my website. I'm trying to contact the owner of www.rofof.com hoping to have the canonical tag removed from their website. In the meantime, I've disavowed the www.rofof.com, the site that has canonical tag. Will that have any effect though? Will disavow eliminate the effect of a rel canonical tag on the disavowed domain or does it only affect links on the disavowed website? If it only affects links then should I attempt to disavow all the pages that link to rofof.com? Thanks for reading. I really appreciate any insight you folks can offer.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brucepomeroy2 -
No designated 404 page, but any made-up URL path displays homepage Good / Bad?
I have a custom website where if you type in companyxyz.com/_any-made-up-url _it displays the homepage. So then you will see the homepage and in the URL bar the made up URL path remains visible "companyxyz.com/any-made-up-url" Is this good or bad or not an issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
301 or 404 Question for thin content Location Pages we want to remove
Hello All, I have a Hire Website with many categories and individual location pages for each of the 70 depots we operate. However, being dynamic pages, we have thousands of thin content pages. We have decided to only concentrate on our best performing locations and get rid of the rest as its physically impossible to write unique content for all our location pages for every categories. Therefore my question is. Would it cause me problems by having to many 301's for the location pages I am going to re-direct ( i was only going to send these back to the parent category page) or should I just 404 all those location pages and at some point in the future when we are in a position to concentrate on these locations then redo them with new content ? in terms of url numbers It would affect a few thousand 301's or 404's depending on people thoughts. Also , does anyone know what percentage of thin content on a site should be acceptable ?.. I know , none is best in an ideal world but it would be easier if there we could get away with a little percentage. We have been affected by Panda , so we are trying to tidy things up as best at possible, Any advice greatly appreciated? thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Should We Add the W3.org Language Tag To Every Page Or Just The Home Page?
Greetings, We have five international sites around the world, two of which are in difference languages. Currently we have the following line of html code on the home page of each of the sites: Clearly, we need to change the "en" portion for the sites that aren't in English, but, should we include that meta tag in each of the site's pages, or will the home page suffice. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CSawatzky0 -
Need to shorten and change site-wide meta titles (50.000 pages). OK to do all at once?
Just noticed that google completely screws up our meta titles in the SERPs. Google decided to show titles which are not understandable to visitors and worst of all even shows titles in different languages than the actual page. The words of the displayedf titles are nowhere on the page (actually they are parts of old title tags that we stopped using 6 months ago and that we used on different pages). Pages are crawled weekly. All our meta titles are a bit longer than the 70 character limit, so I plan to rephrase and shorten them so that they are all max. 66 characters. Dynamically we choose different variations of title texts based on character length of keywords. Having titles that fit into SERPs without cutting are supposed to have less probability to be changed by google. I heard some people reporting loss of rankings after site-wide meta title changes. Especially since we changed title tags sitewide already about 6 months ago I am a bit concerned. How would you proceed? Just do the site-wide change all at once?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Do I need to use canonicals if I will be using 301's?
I just took a job about three months and one of the first things I wanted to do was restructure the site. The current structure is solution based but I am moving it toward a product focus. The problem I'm having is the CMS I'm using isn't the greatest (and yes I've brought this up to my CMS provider). It creates multiple URL's for the same page. For example, these two urls are the same page: (note: these aren't the actual urls, I just made them up for demonstration purposes) http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Omnipress
http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/bossman.cmsx (I know this is terrible, and once our contract is up we'll be looking at a different provider) So clearly I need to set up canonical tags for the last two pages that look like this: http://www.omnipress.com/boss-man" /> With the new site restructure, do I need to put a canonical tag on the second page to tell the search engine that it's the same as the first, since I'll be changing the category it's in? For Example: http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/ will become http://www.website.com/home/MEET-OUR-TEAM/team-leaders/boss-man My overall question is, do I need to spend the time to run through our entire site and do canonical tags AND 301 redirects to the new page, or can I just simply redirect both of them to the new page? I hope this makes sense. Your help is greatly appreciated!!0 -
Canonical issue with my Home Page
Hi, My site has several canonical issues that should be fixed. http://www.crosscountryallied.com For my Home Page, more links are pointing at www.crosscountryallied.com/ (887) than http:// http://www.crosscountryallied.com/ctAlliedWebSite (27). It is recommended that I implement a 301 redirect to recapture a significant amount of link value. The following lists show the most common canonicalization errors that can be produced when using default settings on my web server: Microsoft Internet Information Services 6 (IIS): http://www.crosscountryallied.com/ http://www.crosscountryallied.com/default.jsp (or .jsp depending on the version) http://crosscountryallied.com/ http://crosscountryallied.com/default.jsp or any combination with different capitalization. Each of these URLs spreads out the value of backlinks to our homepage. Should I just redirect them to: http://www.crosscountryallied.com and add a canonical tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0