How to de-index old URLs after redesigning the website?
-
Thank you for reading.
After redesigning my website (5 months ago) in my crawl reports (Moz, Search Console) I still get tons of 404 pages which all seems to be the URLs from my previous website (same root domain).
It would be nonsense to 301 redirect them as there are to many URLs. (or would it be nonsense?)
What is the best way to deal with this issue?
-
Thank you Clever PhD, really valuable insights!
-
I completely agree with all of the above - I've taken her point more like my own. Where receiving thousands of annoying 404 errors from pages that haven't existed for many months just gets annoying!
-
I respectfully disagree with all of the above. Please repeat after me, 404s are not bad, they are diagnostic, 404s are not bad, they are diagnostic, 404s are not bad, they are diagnostic.
After redesigning my website (5 months ago) in my crawl reports (Moz, Search Console) I still get tons of 404 pages which all seems to be the URLs from my previous website (same root domain).
**Part 1 Internal links that 404s from Moz Crawl: **The 404s that show up in the Moz crawl are only going to be from an internal link on your website. The Moz crawl only looks at internal links and not links from other website. In other words, if you see 404s in your Moz crawl, that means, somewhere, you are linking to those pages and that is why the 404s are showing up. Download the CSV and you will find them in your Moz crawl. Other tools such as screaming frog, Botify, Deep Crawl, will show you a similar analysis.
Simple solution. Go through your code and remove the internal links on your site that direct the Moz crawler to those pages and the 404s will go away. (FYI this same approach will work for any internal 301s) These 404 errors in the Moz report are great diagnostic signals on where to fix your site. It is bad for users to click on a link within your website and get sent to a page that does not exist.
**Part 2 external links from Search Console: **The 404s that show up in Search console can come from your internal links on your site AND external links from other sites. Google will keep trying to crawl these links due to other sites linking to pages on your site and your own internal links. For internal link fixing - see suggestion above. For external links you need a different approach.
Look at the external links, where are they coming from? Are they from quality websites? Do they go to formerly important pages on your websites (ie pages that were good converters? If so, then use the 301 redirect to send them to the correct replacement page (and this is not always the home page). You get users to the correct page and also any link equity is passed along as well and this can help with your site rankings. If the link goes to former page on your site that was not any good to start with and the links that come into it are poor quality, then you just let the page 404. Tools such as Moz Open Site Explorer or Ahrefs or Majestic can help with this assessment - but usually you can just look at a site linking to you and tell if it is crap or not.
You need to consider the above regardless of if you want to get the pages that are 404ing in question out of the Google index as if you get Google to remove the page from the index, it will then see the internal link on your site and then find the 404 again. If you have removed the links to the 404 pages on your site, eventually Google will stop crawling them and drop out of the index.
Important note regarding the use of robots.txt. Blocking Google from crawling the 404s will not remove the pages from the index, Google will just stop crawling them. Google has to be able to crawl the URL to see the 404 and then see that it is a bad page and then remove the page from the index. Blocking with robots.txt stops Google from doing that. As soon as you take the page out of robots Google will recrawl and the 404 shows up again. Robots.txt treats a symptom that is a red herring, allowing the 404 to occur takes care of the issue permanently.
Dead pages are a natural part of the web. Let Google see the 404 (if it truly is a page that should 404 and has no link equity that should be passed along with a 301). Google will crawl the 404 several times, you will see it in search console several times. It is ok. You are not penalized for X number of 404s. You may lose ranking if you 404 a page that Google used to rank well, but this is just because Google will not keep a page highly ranked that does not exist :-). Help Google out by cleaning up your internal link structure so when it sees that you do not link to the page any more, then that is a signal that the page should 404. Google knows that due to the nature of the web, pages will time out on occasion and show an error. Google will continue to recrawl a page just to make sure, it wants to give you the benefit of the doubt. Therefore, you have to give clear directives by not linking to dead pages so that after Google double and triple checks the page, it will finally drop it. You will see the 404 in your Search Console for several months then it will eventually go away.
Hope that makes sense. Good luck!
-
Hey Lana, If you really think that 301 does not make sense in that case you can always add the URLs in the robots.txt file and once Google will recrawl your website, Google will de-index the pages from the index.
Another thing you can do is using the de-index feature in Google webmaster tool. You can do that by getting in to your GWT, Optimization > Remove URLs and do that accordingly.
Hope this helps!
-
I see the point. Thanks Liam. As the most of our 404 pages starts with /en-GB/ i will do like this:
Disallow: /en-GB/
-
Hi Lana,
I've been having the same problem on one of our websites. I've been 301 redirecting over 5,000 URL's but still receive a lot of 404 errors. One of the main reasons for these 404 errors still appearing is other bots such as Bing Bot that is still crawling the old URL's.
To resolve this, I would just block them in your robots.txt file. We blocked our old product URL's that were under a "product directory like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /product/
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
-
How to index your website pages on Google 2020 ?
Hey! Hopefully, everyone is fine here I tell you some step how you are index your all website pages on Google 2020. I'm already implementing these same steps for my site Boxes Maker. Now Below I'm giving you some steps for indexing your website pages. These are the most important ways to help Google find your pages: Add a sitemap. ... Make sure people know your site. ... Ensure full navigation on your site. ... Apply the indexing application to your homepage. ... Sites that use URL parameters other than URLs or page names may be more difficult to broadcast.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fbowable0 -
Google index
Hello, I removed my site from google index From GWT Temporarily remove URLs that you own from search results, Status Removed. site not ranking well in google from last 2 month, Now i have question that what will happen if i reinclude site url after 1 or 2 weeks. Is there any chance to rank well when google re index the site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Getmp3songspk0 -
Stolen website content
Hello, recently we had a lot of content written for our new website. Unfortunately me and my partner have went separate ways, and he has used all my unique content on his own website. All our product descriptions, about us etc, he simply changed the name of the company. He has agreed to take the content down, so that i can now put this content on our new website which is currently being designed. Will google see this as duplicate content as it has been on a website before? Even though the content has been removed from the original website. I was worried as the content is no longer "fresh" so to speak. Can any one help me with this,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexogilvie0 -
Index Pages become No-Index
Hi Mozzers, Here is the scenario: I created a landing page targeting Holiday keywords for the holiday season. The page has been crawled and indexed - I see my landing page in the SERP. However, because of the CMS layout, since the Holiday is over and I don't want it to be displayed on the homepage, i have to remove the page from hp which makes it no-index (don't ask why, it's how the CMS was built). Question: How does this affect this LP's search? Since it's already crawled and etc. will it still be on the SERP after i change the page to no-index? If I remove the no-index next year for the holiday season, how does this all play out? Any insights or information provided will be appreciated. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TommyTan0 -
How long does google index old urls?
Hey guys, We are currently in the process of redesigning a site but in two phases as the timeline issues. So there will be up to a 4 week gap between the 1st and 2nd set of redirects. These urls will be idle 4 weeks before the phase content is ready. What effect if any will this have on the domain and page authority? Thanks Rob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daracreative0 -
Should /node/ URLs be 301 redirect to Clean URLs
Hi All! We are in the process of migrating to Drupal and I know that I want to block any instance of /node/ URLs with my robots.txt file to prevent search engines from indexing them. My question is, should we set 301 redirects on the /node/ versions of the URLs to redirect to their corresponding "clean" URL, or should the robots.txt blocking and canonical link element be enough? My gut tells me to ask for the 301 redirects, but I just want to hear additional opinions. Thank you! MS
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MargaritaS0 -
Google is Really Slow to Index my New Website
(Sorry for my english!) A quick background: I had a website at thewebhostinghero.com which had been slapped left and right by Google (both Panda & Penguin). It also had a manual penalty for unnatural links which had been lifted in late april / early may this year. I also had another domain, webhostinghero.com, which was redirecting to thewebhostinghero.com. When I realized I would be better off starting a new website than trying to salvage thewebhostinghero.com, I removed the redirection from webhostinghero.com and started building a new website. I waited about 5 or 6 weeks before putting any content on webhostinghero.com so Google had time to notice that the domain wasn't redirecting anymore. So about a month ago, I launched http://www.webhostinghero.com with 100% new content but I left thewebhostinghero.com online because it still brings a little (necessary) income. There are no links between the websites except on one page (www.thewebhostinghero.com/speed/) which is set to "noindex,nofollow" and is disallowed to search engines in robots.txt. I made sure the web page was deindexed before adding a "nofollow" link from thewebhostinghero.com/speed => webhostinghero.com/speed Since the new website launch, I've been publishing new content (from 2 to 5 posts) daily. It's getting some traction from social networks but it gets barely any clicks from Google search. It seems to take at least a week before Google indexes new posts and not all posts are indexed. The cached copy of the homepage is 12 days old. In Google Webmaster Tools, it looks like Google isn't getting the latest sitemap version unless I resubmit it manually. It's always 4 or 5 days old. So is my website just too young or could it have some kind of penalty related to the old website? The domain has 4 or 5 really old spammy links from the previous domain owner which I couldn't get rid of but otherwise I don't think there's anything tragic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Canonical url issue
Canonical url issue My site https://ladydecosmetic.com on seomoz crawl showing duplicate page title, duplicate page content errors. I have downloaded the error reports csv and checked. From the report, The below url contains duplicate page content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trixmediainc
https://www.ladydecosmetic.com/unik-colours-lipstick-caribbean-peach-o-27-item-162&category_id=40&brands=66&click=brnd And other duplicate urls as per report are,
https://www.ladydecosmetic.com/unik-colours-lipstick-plum-red-o-14-item-157&category_id=40&click=colorsu&brands=66 https://www.ladydecosmetic.com/unik-colours-lipstick-plum-red-o-14-item-157&category_id=40 https://www.ladydecosmetic.com/unik-colours-lipstick-plum-red-o-14-item-157&category_id=40&brands=66&click=brnd But on every these url(all 4) I have set canonical url. That is the original url and an existing one(not 404). https://www.ladydecosmetic.com/unik-colours-lipstick-caribbean-peach-o-27-item-162&category_id=0 Then how this issues are showing like duplicate page content. Please give me an answer ASAP.0