How to Destroy Old 404 Pages
-
Hello Mozzers,
So I just purchased a new domain and to my surprise it has a domain authority of 13 right out of the box (what luck!). I needed to investigate. To make a long story short the domain used to be home to a music blog that had hundreds of pages which of course are all missing now. I have about 400 pages on my hands that are resulting in a 404. How or what is the best method for eliminating these pages.
Does deleting the Crawl Errors in Google Webmaster Tools do anything?
Thanks
-
What a thorough response! I'm in the Option B scenario. The old content has nothing to do with my site so I don't need to redirect the old URLs. I will just wait out Google crawling those 404s.
Thanks!
-
You have a few options here. Option A is if you are going to build a site that will have similar topic based content as the old one and you want to use a larger portion of that domain authority from the old site to the new.
-
Pull those 404 errors from GWT in a spreadsheet. This gives you a corpus of links to work with.
-
Go into Bing WT and they have a way to browse what they have and had indexed. What is nice here is that Bing will tell you what URLs (even old 404s) have links to them.
-
Run your links through Open Site Explorer. You can then also get linking data, FB and Twitter data in addition to OSE data on the old URLs
-
If need be, run the more important dead URLs through the Wayback Machine http://archive.org/web/web.php you can now even see what the actual content was on the old URLs.
-
After doing all of this, pretty quick you should be able to see if there were any authority pages on the site that have now expired and you also know what those pages were about via the wayback machine.
-
On the authority pages, create new pages on the new site that have to do with the same topic, i.e. semantically related to the old page.
-
301 the old authority pages to the new authority pages.
-
The rest of the URLs you can just let them 404. They will continue to 404 several time until Google drops them. I would leave them in GWT as over time they should drop out as Google starts to ignore those pages, this may take a few months. You can then just check GWT for any new 404s that might show up from the new site and you need to deal with.
One thing to note on all of this. You may have to let the old sitemap 404 vs redirecting the sitemap.
http://moz.com/blog/how-to-fix-crawl-errors-in-google-webmaster-tools
"One frustrating thing that Google does is it will continually crawl old sitemaps that you have since deleted to check that the sitemap and URLs are in fact dead. If you have an old sitemap that you have removed from Webmaster Tools, and you don’t want being crawled, make sure you let that sitemap 404 and that you are not redirecting the sitemap to your current sitemap."
If you delete the 404s from GWT the next time Google spiders the old pages they will just show up again, up to you then.
Option B - if you dont care about the old pages, just let them 404 as mentioned above, but be aware of the issue with old sitemaps. You can check the Google index for old URLs in the SERPs or also if you look into GWT and look for data on your Search Traffic. Make sure that the old URLs are not showing up under your Search Queries.
-
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 to do with large number of old/outdated pages?
Are we redoing a large portion of our site (not ecommerce). We have a large number of pages (about 2000 indexed pages, out of about 3000) that have been forgetten about until recently, are very outdated, don't drive any traffic (according to Google Analytics) But they are ranking very well for the targeting keyword (#3 organic for most). What should I do with those pages? Could you give any guidance on whether we should or what affect it might have one the rest of the website if we delete those pages or simply 301 redirecting all those pages to the home page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aphoontrakul0 -
Duplicate page content on numerical blog pages?
Hello everyone, I'm still relatively new at SEO and am still trying my best to learn. However, I have this persistent issue. My site is on WordPress and all of my blog pages e.g page one, page two etc are all coming up as duplicate content. Here are some URL examples of what I mean: http://3mil.co.uk/insights-web-design-blog/page/3/ http://3mil.co.uk/insights-web-design-blog/page/4/ Does anyone have any ideas? I have already no indexed categories and tags so it is not them. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 3mil0 -
Base copy on 1 page, then adding a bit more for another page - potential duplicate content. What to do?
Hi all, We're creating a section for a client that is based on road trips - for example, New York to Toronto. We have a 3 day trip, a 5 day trip, a 7 day trip and a 10 day trip. The 3 day trip is the base, and then for the 5 day trip, we add another couple of stops, for the 7 day trip, we add a couple more stops and then for the 10 day trip, there might be two or three times the number of stops of the initial 3 day trip. However, the base content is similar - you start at New York, you finish in Toronto, you likely go through Niagara on all trips. It's not exact duplicate content, but it's similar content. I'm not sure how to look after it? The thoughts we have are:1) Use canonical tags 3,5,7 day trips to the 10 day trip.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalhothouse
2) It's not exactly duplicate content, so just go with the content as it is We don't want to get hit by any penalty for duplicate content so just want to work out what you guys think is the best way to go about this. Thanks in advance!0 -
Hreflang and paginated page
Hi, I can not seem to find good documentation about the use of hreflang and paginated page when using rel=next , rel=prev
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TjeerdvZ
Does any know where to find decent documentatio?, I could only find documentation about pagination and hreflang when using canonicals on the paginated page. I have doubts on what is the best option: The way tripadvisor does it:
http://www.tripadvisor.nl/Hotels-g187139-oa390-Corsica-Hotels.html
Each paginated page is referring to it's hreflang paginated page, for example: So should the hreflang refer to the pagined specific page or should it refer to the "1st" page? in this case:
http://www.tripadvisor.nl/Hotels-g187139-Corsica-Hotels.html Looking foward to your suggestions.0 -
Interlinking from unique content page to limited content page
I have a page (page 1) with a lot of unique content which may rank for "Example for sale". On this page I Interlink to a page (page 2) with very limited unique content, but a page I believe is better for the user with anchor "See all Example for sale". In other words, the 1st page is more like a guide with items for sale mixed, whereas the 2nd page is purely a "for sale" page with almost no unique content, but very engaging for users. Questions: Is it risky that I interlink with "Example for sale" to a page with limited unique content, as I risk not being able to rank for either of these 2 pages Would it make sense to "no index, follow" page 2 as there is limited unique content, and is actually a page that exist across the web on other websites in different formats (it is real estate MLS listings), but I can still keep the "Example for sale" link leading to page 2 without risking losing ranking of page 1 for "Example for sale"keyword phrase I am basically trying to work out best solution to rank for "Keyword for sale" and dilemma is page 2 is best for users, but is not a very unique page and page 2 is very unique and OK for users but mixed up writing, pictures and more with properties for sale.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Effect of Removing Footer Links In all Pages Except Home Page
Dear MOZ Community: In an effort to improve the user interface of our business website (a New York CIty commercial real estate agency) my designer eliminated a standardized footer containing links to about 20 pages. The new design maintains this footer on the home page, but all other pages (about 600 eliminate the footer). The new design does a very good job eliminating non essential items. Most of the changes remove or reduce the size of unnecessary design elements. The footer removal is the only change really effect the link structure. The new design is not launched yet. Hoping to receive some good advice from the MOZ community before proceeding My concern is that removing these links could have an adverse or unpredictable effect on ranking. Last Summer we launched a completely redesigned version of the site and our ranking collapsed for 3 months. However unlike the previous upgrade this modifications does not URL names, tags, text or any major element. Only major change is the footer removal. Some of the footer pages provide good (not critical) info for visitors. Note the footer will still appear on the home page but will be removed on the interior pages. Are we risking any detrimental ranking effect by removing this footer? Can we compensate by adding text links to these pages if the links from the footer are removed? Seems irregular to have a home page footer but no footer on the other pages. Are we inviting any downgrade, penalty, adverse SEO effect by implementing this? I very much like the new design but do not want to risk a fall in rank and traffic. Thanks for your input!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
NOINDEX listing pages: Page 2, Page 3... etc?
Would it be beneficial to NOINDEX category listing pages except for the first page. For example on this site: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/101/fsx-missions/ Has lots of pages such as Page 2, Page 3, Page 4... etc: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflyawaysimulation.com+fsx+missions Would there be any SEO benefit of NOINDEX on these pages? Of course, FOLLOW is default, so links would still be followed and juice applied. Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640 -
Links to Facebook pages
I would like to ask if anyone has any knowledge regarding linking to a company's facebook page. I have built a few links to a client's facebook page in an effort to have it rank better in SERPs. I just learned that unlike twitter and linkedin, it is apparently not possibly to directly link to facebook pages. At least it is not possible from a search engine's perspective. If you follow any facebook page link while you are not logged into facebook, you are redirected to the facebook home page. I can't think of any way around this obstacle. I'd love some clever solution such as providing a URL which includes a basic dummy facebook login but there is nothing I am aware of to achieve this result. Does anyone have any ideas on this topic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanKent0