Google WMT continues reporting fixed 404s - why?
-
I work with a news site that had a heavy restructuring last spring. This involved removing many pages that were duplicates, tags, etc. Since then, we have taken very careful steps to remove all links coming into these deleted pages, but for some reason, WMT continues to report them.
By last August, we had cleared over 10k 404s to our site, but this lasted only for about 2 months and they started coming back. The "linked from" gives no data, and other crawlers like seomoz aren't detecting any of these errors. The pages aren't in the sitemap and I've confirmed that they're not really being linked from from anywhere.
Why do these pages keep coming back? Should I even bother removing them over and over again?
Thanks
-Juanita
-
wait, when you say this do you mean broken links on your site or links on other sites pointing to pages on your site that no longer exist?
"Since then, we have taken very careful steps to remove all links coming into these deleted pages, but for some reason, WMT continues to report them. "
If internal links then by all means fix broken links on your site.
If external links pointing go your site, don't have those sites remove your links - just 301 that old url that they are pointing to (if there is PR to be gained) and point them to the closest similar page or section. If it's only a link here or ther then let them 404. 404ing is a natural occurance and Google has no problem with it.
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
-
404s effecting crawl rate?
We made a change to our site where we all of a sudden we are creating a large number of 404 pages. Is this effecting the crawl/indexing rate? Currently we've submitted 3.4 million pages, have over 834K indexed but have over and 330K pages not found. Since the large increase in 404s we've noticed a decrease in pages crawled per day. I found this Q & A in Webmasters (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html) but it seems like the 404s should not have an effect. Is this article out of date? What do you think fellow Moz-ers? Is this a problem?
Technical SEO | | JoshKimber0 -
Dev Site Was Indexed By Google
Two of our dev sites(subdomains) were indexed by Google. They have since been made private once we found the problem. Should we take another step to remove the subdomain through robots.txt or just let it ride out? From what I understand, to remove the subdomain from Google we would verify the subdomain on GWT, then give the subdomain it's own robots.txt and disallow everything. Any advice is welcome, I just wanted to discuss this before making a decision.
Technical SEO | | ntsupply0 -
Pages to be indexed in Google
Hi, We have 70K posts in our site but Google has scanned 500K pages and these extra pages are category pages or User profile pages. Each category has a page and each user has a page. When we have 90K users so Google has indexed 90K pages of users alone. My question is. Should we leave it as they are or should we block them from being indexed? As we get unwanted landings to the pages and huge bounce rate. If we need to remove what needs to be done? Robots block or Noindex/Nofollow Regards
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Configure a mobile site with WMT
Hello Everyone, I'm in a situation that I have no idea how to handle. I have only really dealt with RWD, and not a mobile-specific site. Anyway, I have a client who is launching an m.domian.com for their mobile site, how do I add/configure this in WMT? Thanks Zach
Technical SEO | | Zachary_Russell0 -
De-indexed from Google
Hi Search Experts! We are just launching a new site for a client with a completely new URL. The client can not provide any access details for their existing site. Any ideas how can we get the existing site de-indexed from Google? Thanks guys!
Technical SEO | | rikmon0 -
Why is Google not displaying the right URL on SERP?
Google is not displaying the URL correctly for this page. (See image) Here is the search that I performed: http://goo.gl/xk7L8 If you click on the URL, it doesn't take you to the page that it the URL references. Any ideas? It should show this URL: http://www.theskincentermd.com/breast-enhancement tsc-serp.png
Technical SEO | | theBREWROOM0 -
Is the number at the top of google wrong
If I search a term, any term, Google states at the top 922,000 results (as an example). However, if you click the "O" in google at the bottom you can get the 2nd and 3rd and 4th page of results. Those numbers don't match. The result of my searches would show anywhere from 120-140 results, but the number at the top is in the tens of thousands if not millions. Am I missing something here? Shouldn't these numbers be the same?
Technical SEO | | StreetwiseReports0 -
How to disallow google and roger?
Hey Guys and girls, i have a question, i want to disallow all robots from accessing a certain root link: Get rid of bots User-agent: * Disallow: /index.php?_a=login&redir=/index.php?_a=tellafriend%26productId=* Will this make the bots not to access any web link that has the prefix you see before the asterisk? And at least google and roger will get away by reading "user-agent: *"? I know this isn't the standard proceedure but if it works for google and seomoz bot we are good.
Technical SEO | | iFix0