Should there be a canonical tag on my 404 error page?
-
In my crawl diagnostics, I notice some 4xx client errors. They are appearing for pages that no longer exist, so I'm not sure what the problem is. Shouldn't they just be dealt as 404's?
Anyway, on closer inspection I noticed that my 404 error page contains a canonical tag which points to the missing page. Could this be the issue? Is it a good idea to remove the canonical tag from this error page?
Thanks.
-
I repeated this elsewhere, but I think canonical on 404 page does make sense, especially if you consider the following two statements true:
- There is a reason for 404s, don't 301 everything
- There is no reason to lose the value of someone linking to your page.
If those 2 statements are true then you should create an individual error page, and then everytime you serve a 404 you should include canonical to that error page. That page should have useful content (explanation of page missing and where you could go), probably a search box, and links to the most valuable content on your site. This satisfies both points.
-
1 there is no point having canonical on a 404 page. I would say its a very confusing signal to bots
2 don't always 301. 404 exists for a reason. In most cases I will 301 old pages but there are cases where letting pages 404 is the correct way forward
-
If the old pages are NOINDEX, are the old inbound links still passed on to the new page via the 301's. and is the google juice passed? I've wanted to do exactly what you suggest, but was afraid of severing the Linking credit from those old inbounds.
-
The canonical tag on errorpages make no sense! For gone webpages just setup a 301 redirect in the .htaccess. And make use of the Google webmaster tools to identify waht Google sees.
-
Discovering 404s can be useful.
Is the old page deleted? Why not 301 redirect the URL to an appropriate page elsewhere on your site? Tools such as Screaming Frog's SEO Spider can crawl your website and help you discover 404s. By redirecting the page with a permanent redirect search engines will to pass any link juice the previous page had to the new page. Redirecting will also cleanup your pages in the SERPs and help with any broken internal links on your site (though it'd be better to fix those).
There's no need to having a rel=canonical tag on a 404 page (but if you do, ensure the tag is for the page itself and not actual content on your site).
There's also no need for search engines to index your 404 page, so I suggest adding the meta NOINDEX tag to the page.
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
-
301 or 404 old Event pages
I have a site that lists events and then removes them from the site once the date and event has passed. Is it best to let the old event page 404 or 301 back up to a subfolder that lists the current events?
Technical SEO | | Marketing_Today0 -
Redirects & 404 Errors
Hi everyone, I'm probably missing some GLARING error here, but I'm hoping you can help me! We recently built a new website on Wordpress and attempted to use a redirect plugin to take care of some old pages. The issue we are having though, is that when you click an old link you are not automatically redirected and instead are given a 404 error page. Then, when you try to view another page (by clicking a navigation item), every pages shows a 404 error. I implemented a redirect plugin, however it seems to start to work then still throws the 404 page. I believe this has something to do with the htaccess file which has the standard WP rewrite info in there... The way the old site was setup was kind of janky, so wondering if it's on that side or if I'm just going crazy. An old URL example would be http://orchards inn.com/index.php/specials and the new page is http://orchardsinn.com/special-offers. Sometimes the redirect seems to work, and others it actually throws a 404 page, then every other page in the navigation is 404'd as well. Your help is GREATLY appreciated!!
Technical SEO | | marisolmarketing0 -
From page 1th to page 18th @ Google
Hello Mozzers! I have a question, you may help.. How may it be possible that a page ranking well (1th result) goes from 1th result to the 18th page just in 1 day? It doesnt seem to be any kind of penalization.. I now had all suspicious outgoing links to be nofollow (they were not before), this may be a cause .. (?) Do you have any other suggestion? Thanks
Technical SEO | | socialengaged0 -
Rel canonical for partner sites - product pages only or also homepage and other key pages?
Hello there Our main site is www.arenaflowers.com. We also run a number of partner sites (eg: http://flowershop.cancerresearchuk.org/). We've relcanonical'd the products on the partner site back to the main (arenaflowers.com) site. eg: http://flowershop.cancerresearchuk.org/flowers/tutti_frutti_es_2013 rel canonicals back to: http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/tutti_frutti_es_2013). My question: Should we also relcanonical the homepage and other key pages on partner sites back to the main arenaflowers website too? The content is similar but not identical. We don't want our partner sites to be outranking the original (as is the case on kw flower delivery for example). (NB this situation may be complicated by the fact we appear to have an unnatural link penalty on af.com (and when we did an upgrade a while back, the af.com site fell out of the index altogether due to some issues with our move to AWS.) We're getting professional SEO advice on this but wondered what the Moz community's thoughts were.. Cheers, Will
Technical SEO | | ArenaFlowers.com0 -
Canonical tag problem
Hello I'm newbie here i dont know very well about seo but i would like to ask your help? I'm running report about my website and on report I dont have canonical tag on my products. But if i check from on page report link by link it shows that I have canonical tag. At the same time if i check my pages code i can see below canonical tag codes? Do we use canonical tags wrong? What can cause this different information? Could you please help me? Is it important to use canonical tag beginning or end? I'm using now trial version and trying to understand report is correct what is my mistakes. Thanks in advance My code is
Technical SEO | | FRUTIKO0 -
Home page indexed but not ranking...interior pages with thin content outrank home page??
I have a Joomla site with a home page that I can't get to rank for anything beyond the company name @ Google - the site works fine @ Bing and Yahoo. The interior pages will rank all day long but the home page never shows up in the results. I have checked the page code out in every tool that I know about and have had no luck....by all account it should be good to go...any thoughts/comments/help would be greatly appreciated. The site is http://www.selectivedesigns.com Thanks! Greg
Technical SEO | | DougHosmer0 -
Error: Missing Meta Description Tag on pages I can't find in order to correct
This seems silly, but I have errors on blog URLs in our WordPress site that I don't know how to access because they are not in our Dashboard. We are using All in One SEO. The errors are for blog archive dates, authors and just simply 'blog'. Here are samples: http://www.fateyes.com/2012/10/
Technical SEO | | gfiedel
http://www.fateyes.com/author/gina-fiedel/
http://www.fateyes.com/blog/ Does anyone know how to input descriptions for pages like these?
Thanks!!0 -
Google's "cache:" operator is returning a 404 error.
I'm doing the "cache:" operator on one of my sites and Google is returning a 404 error. I've swapped out the domain with another and it works fine. Has anyone seen this before? I'm wondering if G is crawling the site now? Thx!
Technical SEO | | AZWebWorks0