Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Site structure: Any issues with 404'd parent folders?
-
Is there any issue with a 404'd parent folder in a URL? There's no links to the parent folder and a parent folder page never existed. For example say I have the following pages w/ content:
/famous-dogs/lassie/
/famous-dogs/snoopy/
/famous-dogs/scooby-doo/But I never (and maybe never plan to) created a general **/famous-dogs/ **page. Sitemaps.xml does not link to it, nor does any page on my site.
Is there any concerns with doing this? Am I missing out on any sort of value that might pass to a parent folder?
-
Yeah - there is various speculation about how signals or authority traverse folder structures (see for example this whiteboard Friday ) but I haven't seen anything suggesting it's permanent - all of this may be an argument for adding /famous-dogs/ at some point, but I wouldn't personally stress about it not being there at launch.
-
Yeah. I'd just leave it as a 404 in that case
-
In my scenario, considering I might add a parent "famous dogs" page at some point, it'd probably best to leave robots.txt alone, right?
-
Thanks for the response. This is what I expected.
I swear I read somewhere that Google may pass some form of value from a child to a parent. i.e. "/famous-dogs/lassie/" could pass some value to "/famous-dogs/", absent any links. Can't find the source, but I suppose I'm a bit worried that I'd permanently lose out on some value if the parent does not exist initially. Considering I may add a "famous dogs" parent page at some point.
-
PS - if you're worried about the crawling, you could always block it in robots.txt if you really wanted (but unless it's a huge site I wouldn't bother). Note - if you do go this route, do it carefully so as not to block all contents of the folder at the same time!
-
The short answer is that there should be no harm going with your proposed approach.
Longer version: I believe there are cases where Google has tried to crawl a directory like "/famous-dogs/" in your example purely because it appears as a sub-folder in the paths of other pages even though there are not any direct links to it. But even if it does crawl it, if you don't have or intend to have a page there, a 404 is a perfectly valid response.
In general, while there could be a case that it's worth creating a "/famous-dogs/" page if there is search demand you can fulfil, until or unless you do, there is no harm in it returning a 404 response.
-
Seems odd that indexers would care if a parent directory page exists or not. Is there any proof that Google will attempt crawl parent folder pages that aren't in sitemaps.xml and aren't linked to anywhere else?
Perhaps I'm slowly building out my site. Depending on the material/approach, it might make sense to release a page talking about a sub-category (lassie) before releasing content about a parent category (famous dogs). Or maybe "famous dogs" is such low search volume that it doesn't make sense to spend time creating a parent "famous dogs" page.
If I'm understanding correctly, with the above you're effectively telling me to:
1. Build a parent category page. If I don't plan on investing much time/effort into the parent page, noindex it.
2. Reorganize my site folder structure.
Neither seem like a great option.
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
-
Does Google ignore content styled with 'display:none'?
Do you know if an H1 within a div that has a 'display: none' style applied will still be crawled and evaluated by Google? We have that situation on this page on line 136: view-source:https://www.junk-king.com/services/items-we-take/foreclosure-cleanouts Of course we also have an H1 up at the top of the page and are concerned that the second one will cause interference with our SEO efforts. I've seen conflicting and inconclusive information on line - not sure. Thanks for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rastellop0 -
Need a layman's definition/analogy of the difference between schema and structured data
I'm currently writing a blog post about schema. However I want to set the record straight that schema is not exactly the same as structured data, although both are often used interchangeably. I understand this schema.org is a vocabulary of global identifiers for properties and things. Structured data is what Google officially stated as "a standard way to annotate your content so machines can understand it..." Does anybody know of a good analogy to compare the two? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Chinese Sites Linking With Bizarre Keywords Creating 404's
Just ran a link profile, and have noticed for the first time many spammy Chinese sites linking to my site with spammy keywords such as "Buy Nike" or "Get Viagra". Making matters worse, they're linking to pages that are creating 404's. Can anybody explain what's going on, and what I can do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alrockn0 -
Other domains hosted on same server showing up in SERP for 1st site's keywords
For the website in question, the first domain alphabetically on the shared hosting space, strange search results are appearing on the SERP for keywords associated with the site. Here is an example: A search for "unique company name" shows the results: www.uniquecompanyname.com as the top result. But on pages 2 and 3, we are getting results for the same content but for domains hosted on the same server. Here are some examples with the domain name replaced: UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Motava
ftp.DOMAIN2.com/?action=news&id=63
META DESCRIPTION TEXT UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 2
www.DOMAIN3.com/?action=news&id=120
META DESCRIPTION TEXT2 UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 2
www.DOMAIN4.com/?action=news&id=120
META DESCRIPTION TEXT2 UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 3
mail.DOMAIN5.com/?action=category&id=17
META DESCRIPTION TEXT3 ns5.DOMAIN6.com/?action=article&id=27 There are more but those are just some examples. These other domain names being listed are other customer domains on the same VPS shared server. When clicking the result the browser URL still shows the other customer domain name B but the content is usually the 404 page. The page title and meta description on that page is not displayed the same as on the SERP.As far as we can tell, this is the only domain this is occurring for.So far, no crawl errors detected in Webmaster Tools and moz crawl not completed yet.0 -
Do links to PDF's on my site pass "link juice"?
Hi, I have recently started a project on one of my sites, working with a branch of the U.S. government, where I will be hosting and publishing some of their PDF documents for free for people to use. The great SEO side of this is that they link to my site. The thing is, they are linking directly to the PDF files themselves, not the page with the link to the PDF files. So my question is, does that give me any SEO benefit? While the PDF is hosted on my site, there are no links in it that would allow a spider to start from the PDF and crawl the rest of my site. So do I get any benefit from these great links? If not, does anybody have any suggestions on how I could get credit for them. Keep in mind that editing the PDF's are not allowed by the government. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
Splitting a Site into Two Sites for SEO Purposes
I have a client that owns a business that really could be easily divided into two separate business in terms of SEO. Right now his web site covers both divisions of his business. He gets about 5500 visitors a month. The majority go to one part of his business and around 600 each month go to the other. So about 11% I'm considering breaking off this 11% and putting it on an entirely different domain name. I think I could rank better for this 11%. The site would only be SEO'd for this particular division of the company. The keywords would not be in competition with each other. I would of course link the two web sites and watch that I don't run into any duplicate content issues. I worry about placing the redirects from the pages that I remove to the new pages. I know Google is not a fan of redirects. Then I also worry about the eventual drop in traffic to the main site now. How big of a factor is traffic in rankings? Other challenges include that the business services 4 major metropolitan areas. Would you do this? Have you done this? How did it work? Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MSWD0 -
URL Structure for Directory Site
We have a directory that we're building and we're not sure if we should try to make each page an extension of the root domain or utilize sub-directories as users narrow down their selection. What is the best practice here for maximizing your SERP authority? Choice #1 - Hyphenated Architecture (no sub-folders): State Page /state/ City Page /city-state/ Business Page /business-city-state/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knowyourbank
4) Location Page /locationname-city-state/ or.... Choice #2 - Using sub-folders on drill down: State Page /state/ City Page /state/city Business Page /state/city/business/
4) Location Page /locationname-city-state/ Again, just to clarify, I need help in determining what the best methodology is for achieving the greatest SEO benefits. Just by looking it would seem that choice #1 would work better because the URL's are very clear and SEF. But, at the same time it may be less intuitive for search. I'm not sure. What do you think?0 -
Is 404'ing a page enough to remove it from Google's index?
We set some pages to 404 status about 7 months ago, but they are still showing in Google's index (as 404's). Is there anything else I need to do to remove these?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0