404 errors
-
Hey everyone. Appreciate your insight on this. I just finished redesigning my website today and just published it to my server. I decided to go with a real basic html site figuring I may get better results with the search engines. I still have a bunch of optomizing to do but I have a question.
Since I was using aspx it is safe to say that many sites will be linked to those old pages. In the interest of not loosing this traffic I told IIS7 to do a 302 redirect to my home page for any 404 errors. Is this the best thing to do or is their a better way?
Thanks much
Ron
-
I agree with Ryan. You need to setup 301 redirects in IIS for all the old pages.
Never use a 302.
-
You want to go through each page of your old site and if it had any links or authority at all, create a 301 redirect for it. That tells the engines your page has permanently moved, and tells them where to find the new page. This will preserve the majority of your authority for every page.
If you 302 them all to the homepage you're telling the search engine "this content is related and is a substitute, for now". However, you want -all- your pages to continue being indexed with as much authority as possible, not just the homepage.
After you've got your 301's set up correctly, then you can focus on creating a 404 page that is helpful to your users. Usually this means suggesting content based on the keywords in the URL, or including a search or link to the homepage.
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
-
404's and a drop in Rank - Site maps? Data Highlighter?
I managed an old (2006 design) ticket site that was hosted and run by the same company that handled our point of sale. (Think, really crappy, customer had to click through three pages to get to the tickets, etc.) In Mid February, we migrated that old site to a new, more powerful site, built by a company that handles sites exclusively for ticket brokers. (My site: TheTicketKing. - dot - com) Before migration, I set up 301's for all the pages that we had currently ranked for, and had inbound links pointing to, etc. The CMS allowed me to set every one of those landing pages up with fresh content, so I created unique content for all of them, ran them through the Moz grader before launch, etc. We launched the site in Mid February, and it seemed like Google responded well. All the pages that we had 301's set up for stayed up fairly well in rank, and some even reached higher positions, while some took a few weeks to get back up to where they were before. Google was also giving us an average of 8-10K impressions per day, compared to 3000 per day with the old site. I started to notice a slow drop in impressions in mid April (after two months of love from Google,) and we lost rank on all our non branded pages around 4/23. Our branded terms are still fine, we didn't get a message from Google, and I reached out to the company that manages our site, asking if they had any issues with their other clients. They suggested that I resubmit our sitemaps. I did, and saw everything bump back up (impressions and rank) for just one week. Now we're back in the basement with all the non branded terms once again. I realize that Google could have penalized us without giving us a message, but what got me somewhat optimistic was the fact that resubmitting our sitemaps did bring us back up for around a week. One other thing that I was working on with the site just before the drop was Google's data highlighter. I submitted a set of pages that now come back with errors, after Google seemed to be fine with the data set before I submitted it. So now I'm looking at over 300 data highlighter errors when I'm in WMT. I deleted that set, but I still get the error listings in WMT, as if Google is still trying to understand those pages. Would that have an effect on our rank? Finally I do see that our 404's have risen steadily since the migration, to over 1000 now, and the people who manage the CMS tell me that it would have no effect on rank overall. And we're going to continue to get 404's as the nature of a ticket site would dictate? (Not sure on that, but that's what I was told.) Would anyone care to chime in on these thoughts, or any other clues as to my drop?
Web Design | | Ticket_King0 -
Many errors from previous ecommerce site. Domain is now just a localized wordpress site.
Many errors from previous ecommerce site. Do I need to redirect every single page that no longer exists at this domain? loveyourcabinets.com used to be loveyourkitchenandbath.com but we have since changed course. We want loveyourkitchenandbath.com to be our local site on Long Island and NYC. Loveyourcabinets.com will be an ecommerce project that I'll be revamping in the coming months. I think Moz as well as Google still has all of the old ecommerce pages indexed. And of course, Moz is shooting me a bunch of error all regarding pages from the ecommerce site that used to be on loveyourkitchenandbath.com. Any thoughts? Commentary? Thx
Web Design | | loveyourkitchen0 -
Increase in 404's
Hi, We recently did a website upgrade and as a result url structure changed. There is 140 404's in Google webmaster. Just wondering on best best practice. What should be done with pages that are defiantly not being used any more? For example we used to how .com/why-choose-us* this section is gone for Good - Should I redirect to closest page on site such as .com/about or noindex all together? We also had lots of pages that were on a similar topic but now have condensed these into one or two pages on the new site. Is it OK to 301redirect 10+ 404's to one page on the new site. These will only be redirected to closely related topics so from a user point of view the new presented content will be fine. (Is this bad from a search engine point of view as in pointing lots of old 404's to one particualr page on new site) Your input is welcomed. Thanks,
Web Design | | AdvanceSystems0 -
My 404 page is showing a 4xx error. How can that be fixed?
My actual 404 page is giving a 4xx error.
Web Design | | sbetzen
The page address is http://www.ecowindchimes.com/v/404.asp It loads fine... it is the page all 404's are directed to. Why is it showing a 404 error. The page works. How can this be fixed? Stephen0 -
How do I reduce my vast number of errors that SEO Moz has picked up?
Hi, The number of errors on my site recently jumped up by 450. Most of them are duplicate page content and title errors. I am confused as to how the site suddenly got so many errors. I recently added a new sitemap extension to the site as I was told by my developers that it was hacked a couple of months ago. Please could someone help resolve these errors?
Web Design | | Saunders18650 -
URL parameters causing duplicate content errors
My ISP implemented product reviews. In doing so, each page has a possible parameter string of ?wr=1. I am not receiving duplicate page content and duplicate page title errors for all my product URLs. The report shows the base URL and the base URL?wr=1. My ISP says that the search engines won't have a problem with the parameters and a check of Google Webmaster Tools for my site says I don't have any errors and recommends against configuring URL parameters. How can I get SEOmoz to stop reporting these errors?
Web Design | | NiftySon1 -
Auto-Generated META tag on 404 Page
I'm currently creating a 404 error page for my site and I noticed that a similar site uses some sort of code to automatically generate a meta title. Is this useful? For instance type in electrolux.com/john This page does not exist but in the title you'll see John | Electrolux How can i do this on my site?
Web Design | | evacuumstoreSEO0 -
Getting tons of duplicate content and title errors on my asp.net shopping cart, is there way to resolve this?
The problem I am having is that the web crawlers are seeing all my category pages as the same page thus creating duplicate content and duplicate title errors. At this time I have 270 of these critical errors to deal with. Here is an example: http://www.baysidejewelry.com/category/1-necklaces.aspx http://www.baysidejewelry.com/category/1-necklaces.aspx?pageindex=1 http://www.baysidejewelry.com/category/1-necklaces.aspx?pageindex=2 http://www.baysidejewelry.com/category/1-necklaces.aspx?pageindex=3 http://www.baysidejewelry.com/category/1-necklaces.aspx?pageindex=4 All of these pages are see as the same exact page by the crawlers. Because these pages are generated by a SQL database I don't have a way I know of to fix it.
Web Design | | bsj20020