Are 17000+ Not Found (404) Pages OK?
-
Very soon, our website will go a rapid change which would result in us removing 95% or more old pages (Right now, our site has around 18000 pages indexed).
It's changing into something different (B2B from B2C) and hence our site design, content etc would change.
Even our blog section would have more than 90% of the content removed.
What would be the ideal scenario be?
- Remove all pages and let those links be 404 pages
- Remove all pages and 301 redirect them to the home page
- Remove all unwanted pages and 301 redirect them to a separate page explaining the change (Although it wouldn't be that relevant since our audience has completely changed)- I doubt it would be ideal since at some point, we'd need ot remove this page as well and again do another redirection
-
Mohit,
Tom's advice will help you determine which pages are worth redirecting and which should just go to a 404 page (which should be customized instead of the browser/host default, and should also return a 404 response code in the http header!). My guess is that pages with links only from scraper sites aren't going to pass the tests laid out by Tom and thus would just go to a 404 page. However, any that have decent external links would fit the criteria and would be candidates for a 301 redirect.
-
Just to add a little to this great reply...
Here is how I would determine if it was worth my time to keep some of the old pages.
If the industry is the same but the end user is different, I would make EVERY attempt to keep those old pages. AuthorRank will matter in the future if you can contribute that information into a particular rel=publisher then I think it will be totally worth the time.
If, however, the information has nothing to do with the industry, then I wouldn't even consider taking the time to figure all of this out. I would have a kick ass 404 page to help people find your new stuff though.
Remember too that when you 301 redirect you do in fact loose some "link juice". (I really hate that phrase) So if the incoming links are of little to now value then a 301 will provide even less.
-
Hi Tom.. Thank you for your advice.
The thing is, we don't want to retain the users. They are not going to serve our cause anymore (We used to spend thousands of dollars every month on server costs just to keep up with teh load. now we are cutting it down- so unwanted users are not really something we want as it would result in load increase)
I'll surely follow your advice on OSE. The thing is, we have lot of link to the pages from scraper sites. I am not sure if it's worth keeping though.
-
Hi there
17,000 is quite a lot. I would look at maybe redirecting some of the URLs and I would do this based on certain criteria.
First of all, it helps to have a complete list of your current URLs. Screaming Frog is a great tool for this and is free.
Once you have your URLs, go into your analytics data and see which pages are attracting users. Take a sample size of about 2-3 months. If you're using Google analytics, click on traffic sources -> sources -> all traffic on the left-hand side.
When the dashboard loads, next to the "Primary Dimension" click other, and from the drop down menu click traffic sources, then landing page.
Any page with more than 5 or 10 visitors could be one worth redirecting. If these are pages that visitors might frequently use to get to your site, ensuring they are redirected might help to not interrupt their user journey. A 404 might put them off and go elsewhere.
Next, I'd look at what pages you might want to save to keep your SEO "strength". Put your URL into OpenSiteExplorer and then once done, click on "top pages". We're interested in the "Inbound Links" column here. Export the file into a CSV then sort the URL list in Excel by the Inbound Link total. You can filter here the pages with less links, so for instance you could remove the pages with 3 inbound links or less. It's a general way of doing things and isn't foolproof, but you will be left with a list of pages that could be getting decent PageRank/link equity. Manually check those pages and their backlinks and if you think they're acceptable, make sure you put in a 301 redirect.
Anything that doesn't match either of these criteria I would leave for a 404. You may be left with a lot, but Google knows that 404s are an accepted part of the course and won't penalise you for them. Check out this webmasters blog link.
Hope this helps with your decision making!
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
-
Webshop landing pages and product pages
Hi, I am doing extensive keyword research for the SEO of a big webshop. Since this shop sells technical books and software (legal books, tax software and so on), I come across a lot of very specific keywords for separate products. Isn't it better to try and rank in the SERP's with all the separate product pages, instead of with the landing (category) pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Links / Top Pages by Page Authority ==> pages shouldnt be there
I checked my site links and top pages by page authority. What i have found i dont understand, because the first 5-10 pages did not exist!! Should know that we launched a new site and rebuilt the static pages so there are a lot of new pages, and of course we deleted some old ones. I refreshed the sitemap.xml (these pages are not in there) and upload it in GWT. Why those old pages appear under the links menu at top pages by page authority?? How can i get rid off them? thx, Endre
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Neckermann0 -
One page ranking for all key words, when other targeted pages not ranking
Hi everyone I am fairly new to SEO but have a basic understanding. I have a page that has a lot of content on it (including brand names and product types and relevant info) ranking for a quite a few key words. This is cool, except that I have pages dedicated to each specific key word that are not ranking. The more specific page still has a lot of relevant text on it too. eg. TYRES page - Ranks first for "Tyres". Ranks okay for many tyre key words, including "truck tyres"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDadd
TRUCK TYRES page - not ranking for "truck tyres" Further on, I then have pages not ranking all that well for more specific key words when they should. eg HONDA TRUCK TYRES - Then has a page full of product listings - no actual text. Not Ranking for "honda truck tyres". ABC HONDA TRUCK TYRE - not ranking for "abc honda truck tyre" key word
These pages don't have a lot of content on them, as essentially every single tyre is the same except for the name. But they do have text. So sometimes, these terms don't rank at all. And sometimes, the first TYRES page ranks for it. I have done the basic on page seo for all these pages (hopefully properly) including meta desc, meta titles, H1, H2, using key words in text, alt texting images where possible etc. According to MOZ they are optimised in the 90%. Link building is difficult as they are product listings, so other sites don't really link to these pages. Has anyone got ideas on why the top TYRES page might be so successful and out ranking more specific pages? Any ideas on how I can get the other pages ranking higher as they are more relevant to the search term? We are looking in to a website redesign/overhaul so any advice on how I can prevent this from happening on essentially a new site would be great too. Thanks!0 -
Why is page still indexing?
Hi all, I have a few pages that - despite having a robots meta tag and no follow, no index, they are showing up in Google SERPs. In troubleshooting this with my team, it was brought up that another page could be linking to these pages and causing this. Is that plausible? How could I confirm that? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SSFCU
Sarah0 -
Soft 404 problem
I have a soft 404 problem in webmaster tools for http://www.musicliveuk.com/about/feed and I'm not sure why. I read on here that if it is a main content page it should be fixed but I don't know how. I've tried to 301 redirect the page to http://www.musicliveuk.com/about/ but the redirect doesn't appear to be working? how do I fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
NOINDEX listing pages: Page 2, Page 3... etc?
Would it be beneficial to NOINDEX category listing pages except for the first page. For example on this site: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/101/fsx-missions/ Has lots of pages such as Page 2, Page 3, Page 4... etc: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflyawaysimulation.com+fsx+missions Would there be any SEO benefit of NOINDEX on these pages? Of course, FOLLOW is default, so links would still be followed and juice applied. Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640 -
Canonical category pages
A couple of years ago I used to receive a lot of traffic via my category pages but now I don't receive as much, in the past year I've modified the category pages to canonical. I have 15 genres for the category pages, other than the most recent sorting there is no sorting available for the users on the cat pages, a recent image link added can over time drop off to page 2 of the category page, for example mysite.com/cat-page1.html = 100 image links per page with numbered page navigation, number of cat pages 1-23. New image link can drop off to page 2. mysite.com/dog-page1.html = 100 image links per page with numbered page navigation, number of cat pages 1-53. New image link can drop off to page 2. mysite.com/turtle-page1.html = 100 image links per page with numbered page navigation, number of cat pages 1-2. New image link can drop off to page 2. Now on the first page (eg mysite.com/cat-page1.html) I've set this up to rel= canonical = mysite.com/cat-page1.html One thing that I have noticed is the unique popup short description tooltips that I have on the image links only appears in google for the first pages of each category page, it seems to ignore the other pages. In view of this am I right in applying canonical ref or just treating it as normal pages.? thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Flapjack0 -
Page URL Issue
Hey Friend, I am having sort of a problem. I currently have a subpage with the url of: /musclecars/ I also have a subpage at /muscle-cars/muscle-car-restoration.html Obviously my main url is not listed here. My problem is I am trying to rank for the term Muscle Cars but the first URL does not have the keywords seperated so I rank no where. If I type MuscleCars into google I rank though (but nobody types the keyword in like that). So my question is can I create muscle-cars.mydomainname.com and rank well with that? Or is it better to just use mydomainname.com/muscle-cars/ even though that second term I am ranking for already has that in its url?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shandaman0