What to do with removed pages and 404 error
-
I recently removed about 600 'thin' pages from my site which are now showing as 404 errors in WMT as expected. As I understand it I should just let these pages 404 and eventually they'll be dropped from the index. There are no inbound links pointing at them so I don't need to 301 them. They keep appearing in WMT as 404's though so should I just 'mark as fixed' until they stop appearing? Is there any other action I need to take?
-
If they are truly gone, then a 410 would be the best option for you. Since they are indexed even if there are no links pointing at them, people can still find them besed upon what they are searching for. You never know when your link will show up, because you dont know how long google is going to take to get rid of the links.
http://www.checkupdown.com/status/E410.html
"The 410 error is primarily intended to assist the task of Web maintenance by notifying the client system that the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the Web server wants remote links to the URL to be removed. Such an event is common for URLs which are effectively dead i.e. were deliberately time-limited or simply orphaned. The Web server has complete discretion as to how long it provides the 410 error before switching to another error such as 404"
We did this for a client that needed old defunct pages removed. Once you set the pages to return a 410, and use Google url removal tool, you should see them dropping off really quick. (all of ours were gone within a month) Having that many pages return a 404 may be hurting the experience of your users as when they see a 404, they go right for the back button.
-
410 is the recommended way to tell search engines the page is gone. all of the things mentioned above are a facet of how you should deal with this issue. sorry for the brevity and terrible punction. moz forum is a pretty iffy thing via mobile. my eggs are getting cold.
-
Hi!
The reason why these pages keep popping up in WMT is that they have already been indexed. You could try to remove them from Google's index by using the removal tool in WMT (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/url-removal) or by setting up "301 Redirect" for them to more ideal pages.
Hope this helps
Anders -
Hi,
I would look at this from two perspectives.
1. These thins pages could have been beefed-up with some unique content or at least the content could have been re-written to make them unique. Personally, I prefer to make the duplicate pages unique instead of deleting them.This of course depends on the number of pages and the level of duplication.
2. Now that these pages have been removed from the website, you should be erasing all the links to these from within the website from all the places like, sitemaps and internal linking so that the search engines do not find a link pointing to them that might end-up in a 404 error. You should also consider if there have been any references left to these pages from third-party web properties.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
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
-
Where to position a new page?
Hi there 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | Enrico_Cassinelli
Our website is about a particular region in Italy, the Langhe area, famous for food and wine (barolo and barbaresco are produced here). We need to rollout a few new pages about cellar/winery tours: one main page with the list of tours, and the various subpages for each tour. We already have a page about travel, and a page about wine (with a sub-page about wineries). The URLs looks like:
langhe.net/travel/
langhe.net/wine/wineries/
(Note: i'm translating from italian here) Now, I'm wondering where is better to position the new pages:
langhe.net/travel/winery-tours/name-of-tour/ or
langhe.net/wine/wineries/tours/name-of-tour/ From an SEO perspective (within my limited experience) the first option has a shorter URL, but the second feels more "natural" to me. What do you think? Thanks 🙂
Best0 -
Strange error on my website
Hi Wondering if anyone could help out here please. I tried to crawl my website using screaming frog and got a 500 error warning (odd considering it worked yesterday). I tried google speed test and got the following message - PageSpeed Insights received a 500 response from the server. To analyze pages behind firewalls or that require authentication. However, it also crawled the site and gave me a score of 70/100. It showed the site thumbnail, as normal. This was updated this morning and it showed the latest one so must have crawled. I can access the site, as can my 'people', the site is getting hits from real users in Google Analytics so must be working. Am very puzzled how the site can be working and not be working at the same time! If possible i would rather not share the url. The site is a test of concept and is very messy looking. it is more a test to see what happens if i do x... Many thanks Carl
On-Page Optimization | | daedriccarl0 -
Video Sitemap Error
Hi I am using a Video snippet and this error was generated about the duration tag. Can someone tell me how to fix it? and will this error prevent snippet to work on the sear results? Thanks Mozzers! 1rC5q7g.png
On-Page Optimization | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Duplicate Home Page
Hi, I have a question around best practise on duplicate home pages. The /index.aspx page is showing up as a top referrer in my analytics. I have the rel=canonical tag implemented for the www.mysite.com on both pages. Do I need to 301 the /index.aspx to the mysite.com? I have a lot of links pointing to the /index.aspx (half of those are coming from the mysite.com). www.mysite.com/index.aspx www.mysite.com Many thanks Jon
On-Page Optimization | | JonRaubenheimer0 -
Duplicate Page Title
I have a dating site, it's got a lot of duplicate page titles, most of them are the language buttons for the users to view the site in there language. but I think it's obvious that the buttons don't have anything to do with it. I'm thinking that page tittle is basically a description of what the site is. like for an example "online-dating" is this it? please tell me in terms for a dummy, how to fix it.
On-Page Optimization | | clickit2getwithit0 -
Too Many On-Page Links error
Hello, I am new to this. The crawl of y website reveals that "Too Many On-Page Links" were found on many pages of the website. However, when I check those pages, not more than 5 links are found- I have not included links outside of the post (sidebar/comments/related posts - are these counted in the crawl report ?). I do use SEO SmartLinks Plugin where in some keywords point to Wordpress Categories but am not sure whether that could be the problem at all. Can someone guide what the issue could be and how to debug ?
On-Page Optimization | | sradhey0 -
I have one page on my site... but still get duplicate name and content errors.
i have only the index.html page. my domain has a permanent 301 to the root. why am i getting duplicate problems? i only have one page the index .html???
On-Page Optimization | | one4u2see0 -
What do you do with old web pages?
I have a wordpress blog that I've made a ton of changes to. I have about a dozen pages on it that have old information or I no longer have a use for. In retrospect, I probably should have used the old pages for new content instead of building new pages. Should I just leave them on the site with no links to them, should I mark them as noindex, or should I delete them? I think some of the old pages could be completing with my new pages for ranking due to similar content. Website is: http://continuumweddings.com if you'd like to check out my site. Thanks, Melissa
On-Page Optimization | | mrsmelmitch0