Massive amount of 404s after forum prune
-
So I pruned my vbulletin forum the other week and now webmaster tools detects over 4000 urls as not found. Is there a solution to this? Is this something that could negatively effect rankings? Any ideas?
-
If they are simply urls that are in the index, they will go away after a few weeks. but if there are links pointing to the deleted pages either internal or external, then you need to take action.
For interal links you should delete the links, for external you should 301 thenm to a relative 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
-
Internal link is creating duplicate content issues and generating 404s from website crawl.
Not sure what the best way to describe it but the site is built with Elementor page builder. We are finding out that a feature that is included with a pop modal window renders an HTML code as so: Click So when crawled I think the crawling is linking itself for some reason so the crawl returns something like this: xyz.com/builder/listing/ - what we want what we don't want xyz.com/builder/listing/ xyz.com/builder/listing/%23elementor-action%3Aaction%3Dpopup%3Aopen%26settings%3DeyJpZCI6Ijc2MCIsInRvZ2dsZSI6ZmFsc2V9/ xyz.com/builder/listing/%23elementor-action%3Aaction%3Dpopup%3Aopen%26settings%3DeyJpZCI6Ijc2MCIsInRvZ2dsZSI6ZmFsc2V9//%23elementor-action%3Aaction%3Dpopup%3Aopen%26settings%3DeyJpZCI6Ijc2MCIsInRvZ2dsZSI6ZmFsc2V9/ so you'll notice how that string in the HREF is appended each time and it loops a couple times. Could I 301 this issue, what's the best way to go about handling something like this? It's causing duplicate meta descriptions/content errors for some listing pages we have. I did add a rel='nofollow' to the anchor tag with JavaScript but not sure if that'll help.
Technical SEO | | JoseG-LP0 -
Switching forum software - 301 redirects?
Hi everyone I'm working on a successful Wordpress site that also has a forum attached. The forum currently uses YAF forum software, which requires Windows hosting. The site owner wants to switch to Linux hosting. This is not a problem for WP, but it does mean that we'll need to transfer the forum to Xenforo or something similar that runs on Linux. We're OK with the technical side of this, but we're worried about the SEO implications. The URL for every forum post (more than 50,000 of them) is going to change during this transfer. It seems completely impractical to 301 each of those, so should I just 301 the URLs that have inbound links? Also, what is google's algo going to think when we suddenly have ~50,000 404s? Many thanks in advance! J
Technical SEO | | van280 -
404s in GWT - Not sure how they are being found
We have been getting multiple 404 errors in GWT that look like this: http://www.example.com/UpdateCart. The problem is that this is not a URL that is part of our structure, it is only a piece. The actual URL has a query string on the end, so if you take the query string off, the page does not work. I can't figure out how Google is finding these pages. Could it be removing the query string? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Colbys0 -
Forum website rel="nofollow" is this Good?
Hi, Forum website rel="nofollow" is this Good? We have a Q & A site and have all links as Nofollow. Would this be a good way? Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Google WMT continues reporting fixed 404s - why?
I work with a news site that had a heavy restructuring last spring. This involved removing many pages that were duplicates, tags, etc. Since then, we have taken very careful steps to remove all links coming into these deleted pages, but for some reason, WMT continues to report them. By last August, we had cleared over 10k 404s to our site, but this lasted only for about 2 months and they started coming back. The "linked from" gives no data, and other crawlers like seomoz aren't detecting any of these errors. The pages aren't in the sitemap and I've confirmed that they're not really being linked from from anywhere. Why do these pages keep coming back? Should I even bother removing them over and over again? Thanks -Juanita
Technical SEO | | VoxxiVoxxi0 -
Pros and Cons of a Single Page Forum Thread
Let's say I have a thread located at mysite.com/how-to-do-xyz and that thread has 75 posts. Let's further assume that the average post is well written and about 3-4 sentences long. For SEO purposes, do you think it would make sense to display all posts on a single page, or spread them out over 3-4 pages? Assuming I set it up for a single page, does this have any negative impact on the rare thread that is 500+ posts long? I had always thought about doing it on a single page, but then designed my forum the multi page way because that's what everyone else does. Yet, I see that SEOmoz does it the single page way, so maybe there is some validity to that. Thanks much.
Technical SEO | | PatrickGriffith0 -
Massive Rank Fluctuation in Bing/Yahoo
About two months ago we dealt with some issues that were causing weak rankings in Bing and Yahoo! since then, we've seen rankings rise and plummet dramatically with no changes to the site. On Bing and Yahoo! we've gone from 1st page to less than 50th and back again THREE times. This happens across all keywords, even branded ones that are an exact-match for the domain. Google rankings have continued to rise steadily. We benefited greatly from Penguin, which tanked a number of competitors. Bing webmaster tools aren't showing any server or other kinds of errors during the rank drops. Has anyone every experienced this before?
Technical SEO | | BedeFahey0 -
Having a massive amount of duplicate crawl errors
Im having over 400 crawl errors over duplicate content looking like this: http://www.mydomain.com/index.php?task=login&prevpage=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mydomain.com%2Ftag%2Fmahjon http://www.mydomain.com/index.php?task=login&prevpage=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mydomain.com%2Findex.php%3F etc.. etc... So there seems to be something with my login script that is not working, Anyone knows how to fix this? Thanks
Technical SEO | | stanken0