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.
Google Search Console Showing 404 errors for product pages not in sitemap?
-
We have some products with url changes over the past several months. Google is showing these as having 404 errors even though they are not in sitemap (sitemap shows the correct NEW url).
Is this expected? Will these errors eventually go away/stop being monitored by Google?
-
@woshea Implement 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new ones. This tells search engines that the old page has permanently moved to a new location. It also ensures that visitors who click on old links are redirected to the correct content.
-
Yes, it is not uncommon for Google to show 404 errors for products with URL changes, even if the correct new URLs are listed in the sitemap. This is because Google's crawlers may take some time to recrawl and update their index with the new URLs.
Typically, these 404 errors should eventually go away and stop being monitored by Google once the search engine has fully indexed and recognized the new URLs. However, the time it takes for this process to happen can vary based on the frequency of Googlebot's crawls and the size of your website. I am also facing this issue in my site flyer maker app and resolve this issue using the below techniques.
-
Ensure that your sitemap is up-to-date and includes all the correct URLs for your products.
-
Check for any internal links on your website that may still be pointing to the old URL and update them to the new URL.
-
Use 301 redirects from the old URL to the new URL. For example, set up a 301 redirect from product old URL to product new URL. This tells Google and other search engines that the content has permanently moved to a new location.
-
-
@woshea Yes, it is not uncommon for Google to show 404 errors for products with URL changes, even if the correct new URLs are listed in the sitemap. This is because Google's crawlers may take some time to recrawl and update their index with the new URLs.
Typically, these 404 errors should eventually go away and stop being monitored by Google once the search engine has fully indexed and recognized the new URLs. However, the time it takes for this process to happen can vary based on the frequency of Googlebot's crawls and the size of your website. I am also facing this issue in my site flyer maker app and resolve this issue using the below techniques.
-
Ensure that your sitemap is up-to-date and includes all the correct URLs for your products.
-
Check for any internal links on your website that may still be pointing to the old URL and update them to the new URL.
-
Use 301 redirects from the old URL to the new URL. For example, set up a 301 redirect from product old URL to product new URL. This tells Google and other search engines that the content has permanently moved to a new location.
-
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
-
Are there ways to avoid false positive "soft 404s" by Google
Sometimes I get alerts from Google Search Console that it has detected soft 404s on different websites, and since I take great care to never have true soft 404s, they are always false positives. Today I got one on a website that has pages promoting some events. The language on the page for one event that has sold out says that "tickets are no longer available" which seems to have tripped up Google into thinking the page is a soft 404. It's kind of incredible to me that in the current era we're in, with things like chatGPT that Google doesn't seem to understand natural language. But that has me thinking, are there some strategies or best practices we can use in how we write copy on the page so Google doesn't flag it as soft 404? It seems like anything that could tell a user that an item isn't available could trip it up into thinking it is a 404. In the case of my page, it's actually important information we need to tell the public that an event has sold out, but to use their interest in that event to promote other events. so I don't want the page deindexed or not to rank well!
Technical SEO | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
Search Console Missing field 'mainEntity'
Hello,
SEO Tactics | | spaininternship
I am with a problem, in my site I added a faq with schema structure (https://internships-usa.eu/faq/). But is appearing the following problem in Search Console:
Missing field 'mainEntity' ["WebPage","FAQPage"],"@id":"https://internships-usa.eu/faq/#webpage","url":"https://internships-usa.eu/faq/","name":"Help Center - Internships USA","isPartOf":{"@id":"https://internships-usa.eu/#website"},"datePublished":"2022-05-31T14:43:15+00:00","dateModified":"2022-06-01T08:07:13+00:00","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https://internships-usa.eu/faq/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https://internships-usa.eu/faq/"]}]}, What do I have to do to solve this?0 -
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or postively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please?
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or positively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please? For example at the bottom of this blog post https://www.poppyandperle.com/post/face-painting-a-global-language the hashtags are linked, but they don't go to a page, they go to search results of all other blogs using that hashtag. Seems a bit of a strange approach to me.
Technical SEO | | Mediaholix0 -
Errors In Search Console
Hi All, I am hoping someone might be able to help with this. Last week one of my sites dropped from mid first day to bottom of page 1. We had not been link building as such and it only seems to of affected a single search term and the ranking page (which happens to be the home page). When I was going through everything I went to search console and in crawl errors there are 2 errors that showed up as detected 3 days before the drop. These are: wp-admin/admin-ajax.php showing as response code 400 and also xmlrpc.php showing as response code 405 robots.txt is as follows: user-agent: * disallow: /wp-admin/ allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php Any help with what is wrong here and how to fix it would be greatly appreciated. Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | DaleZon0 -
Pages removed from Google index?
Hi All, I had around 2,300 pages in the google index until a week ago. The index removed a load and left me with 152 submitted, 152 indexed? I have just re-submitted my sitemap and will wait to see what happens. Any idea why it has done this? I have seen a drop in my rankings since. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TomLondon0 -
404 errors on non-existent URLs
Hey guys and gals, First Moz Q&A for me and really looking forward to being part of the community. I hope as my first question this isn't a stupid one but I was just struggling to find any resource that dealt with the issue and am just looking for some general advice. Basically a client has raised a problem with 404 error pages - or the lack thereof- on non-existent URLs on their site; let's say for example: 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towels/asdfas' Obviously content never existed on this page so its not like you're saying 'hey, sorry this isn't here anymore'; its more like- 'there was never anything here in the first place'. Currently in this fictitious example typing in 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towels/asdfas**'** returns the same content as the 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towels' page which I appreciate isn't ideal. What I was wondering is how far do you take this issue- I've seen examples here on the seomoz site where you can edit the URI in a similar manner and it returns the same content as the parent page but with the alternate address. Should 404's be added across all folders on a site in a similar way? How often would this scenario be and issue particularly for internal pages two or three clicks down? I suppose unless someone linked to a page with a misspelled URL... Also would it be worth placing 301 redirects on a small number of common mis-spellings or typos e.g. 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towles' to the correct URLs as opposed to just 404s? Many thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | AJ2340 -
Why are old versions of images still showing for my site in Google Image Search?
I have a number of images on my website with a watermark. We changed the watermark (on all of our images) in May, but when I search for my site getmecooking in Google Image Search, it still shows the old watermark (the old one is grey, the new one is orange). Is Google not updating the images its search results because they are cached in Google? Or because it is ignoring my images, having downloaded them once? Should we be giving our images a version number (at the end of the file name)? Our website cache is set to 7 days, so that's not the issue. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Techboy0 -
How to find links to 404 pages?
I know that I used to be able to do this, but I can't seem to remember. One of the sites I am working on has had a lot of pages moving around lately. I am sure some links got lost in the fray that I would like to recover, what is the easiest way to see links going to a domain that are pointing to 404 pages?
Technical SEO | | MarloSchneider0
