400+ deleted pictures, 404 on URLs, can they be deleted without penalty?
-
A client had a website redesign and over 400 pictures (she's a photographer) were lost. The URL's (ending in .png) are hanging out there and according to the site scan, they have a matching current URL. Since the pictures are gone can the URL be deleted?
-
No problem, happy to help
If you are on WordPress, then I'd highly recommend Yoast's premium plugin as you can set up 410s via the plugin (see screen shot attached) - it's super handy! If you're not using Yoast premium, then it is probably best to chat to your web developer.
I hope that helps!
Cheers,
Casey -
Thank you Casey. I'm honestly not familiar with a 410 header, a chance to learn something new!
If you have any advice about it I'd be grateful
-
Hi there!
If the pictures aren't going to be reloaded (so you can 301 redirect the old URL to the new URL) then in my opinion it would be best to make sure you set a 410 HTTP header (aka a content deleted header) for all those URLs.
The 410 header would be better suited (from what you have said above) as it's more specific. When it comes to Google and 410s, Google will understand you have removed the URL on purpose and if the URLs are indexed, then it should removed them.
I hope that helps!
Cheers,
Casey
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
-
What should my main sitemap URL be?
Hi Mozzers - regarding the URL of a website's main website: http://example.com/sitemap.xml is the normal way of doing it but would it matter if I varied this to: http://example.com/mainsitemapxml.xml or similar? I can't imagine it would matter but I have never moved away from the former before - and one of my clients doesn't want to format the URL in that way. What the client is doing is actually quite interesting - they have the main sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap.xml - that redirects to the sitemap file which is http://example.com/sitemap (with no xml extension) - might that redirect and missing xml extension the redirected to sitemap cause an issue? Never come across such a setup before. Thanks in advance for your feedback - Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Mystery 404's
I have a large number of 404's that all have a similar structure: www.kempruge.com/example/kemprugelaw. kemprugelaw keeps getting stuck on the end of url's. While I created www.kempruge.com/example/ I never created the www.kempruge.com/example/kemprugelaw page or edited permalinks to have kemprugelaw at the end of the url. Any idea how this happens? And what I can do to make it stop? Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
An Unfair Content related penalty :(
Hi Guys, Google.com.au
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jarrodb
website: http://partysuppliesnow.com.au/ We had a massive drop in search queries in WMT around the 11th of september this year, I investigated and it seemed as though there were no updates around this time. Our site is only receiving branded search now - and after investigating i am led to believe that Google has mistakingly affected our website in the panda algorithm. There are no manual penalties applies on this site as confirmed by WMT. Our product descriptions are pretty much all unique but i have noticed that when typing a portion of text from these pages into google search using quotation marks, shopping affiliate sites which we use are being displayed first and our page no where to be seen or last in the results. This leads me to believe that Google thinks we have scraped the content from these sites when in actual fact they have from us. We also have G+ authorship setup. Typing a products full name into Google (tried a handful) our site is not in the top 100 or 200 at times, i think this further clarifies that we are penalised. We would really appreciate some opinions on this. Any course of actions would be great. We don't particularly want to invest in writing content again. From our point of view it looks like Google is stopping our site from ranking because it's getting mixed up with who the originator for our content is. Thanks and really appreciate it.0 -
Are these URLs too Keyword-packed?
Hi guys, Here is the URL: http://www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists/dog-stores-mailing-list.html The target keywords are "Dog stores mailing list" and "Dog stores mailing lists" Does having "mailing-list" and "mailing-lists" in my URL hurt me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Should I disavow without a manual penalty?
Hi all! I currently had someone remove about 70 bad backlinks pointing to our site. Is it worth disavowing the rest? We don't have any manual penalty or anything like that, but is it the sort of thing to use as a precautionary measure only? There are about 100 links in the disavow file that I had built. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | freeunlocks0 -
Penalty recovery gone
Back in August we got a manual penalty lifted by Google for spammy links that we never created. This had been affecting us for almost a year. For about six weeks our traffic bounced back up to pre-penalty levels - between 60 and 120% greater a day from Google search traffic. Since then, our Google organic traffic has decayed to the point where yesterday we were back below our penalty level and we don't have a new penalty. Can anyone give me some advice about what may have caused this? Link to our site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTheScot0 -
URL - Keywords
My domain name contains my top two keywords. Am I penalized if I create another page where I add my domain key words a 2nd time after the domain name along with a subcategory and the name of a state. I don't know what white hat and black hat is so I want to make sure I stay white hat. Also I didn't know it but is it true that your title shows up in your domain name?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Can google read ajax
Looking to load a one page product view instead of 10 pages of pagination. Does google read ajax and see all 10 pages as 1 page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Archers1