Should I worry about these 404's?
-
Just wondering what the thought was on this.
We have a site that lets people generate user profiles and once they delete the profile the page then 404's. I was told there is nothing we can do about those from our developers, but I was wondering if I should worry about these...I don't think they will affect any of our rankings, but you never know so I thought I would ask.
Thanks
-
Kate, Chenzo is right re the 404 but you are likely not getting any real juice from a profile page. That said, a 302 is a temp redirect and does not convey juice. To me, I do not see a reason to do a 301. You could use either.
-
I'll see what they tell me. Sometimes it's difficult because they wont let me into the CPANEL for whatever reason.
-
Thanks for some reason they told me they can't fix it, but I kind of figured there had to be a way to fix those 404's. I'll send them over a couple of ideas and see what they tell me.
Thanks
-
I agree with Robert here Kate -
Keep in mind a 404 is like being placed in a room without any doors or windows.
The link juice stops and so do the bots.
It would be best to re-direct them and or take them down.
You could also implement a site wide script that can populate a landing page when a member has been removed vs a 404 error.
your pal
Chenzo
-
Can your developers instead put a 302 redirect that goes to the same page that says,,, this member profile does not exist?
Seems simple, unless you have a vast membership.
Would love to see other answers.
Robert
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
-
Website(s) Merge Questions
Hello Moz Community I have three separate websites that I have planned on merging into one. I recently acquired a strong domain ( stronger than my existing ones ) & after much deliberation, I have decided to move them together into one domain. Site 1) 1 Forum - Around since 2007 - Originally VBulletin, last year migrated to discourse. Site 2) E-commercece Magento Site - Around since 2010 Site 3) WordPress - Blog & Articles - Around since last year - Currently using the new ( Main Domain I want to use ) After a lot of research and White Board Fridays, I was thinking this would be my best bet: newdomain.com - Merged WordPress & Magento CMS Page. newdomain.com/ forum <-- Will move my forum content & Install to the new domain. newdomain.com/ store <-- Will move my Ecommerce content & Install. Between my developer and I, we have our heads around how to handle the technical aspect of the move, 301s to the new location etc. But one area we want to research before pulling the trigger ( we haven't found much data on this ) **My Main Question:**What is the possible penalty coming for shopping websites vs. content-driven websites, and possibility that forum-based content hosted on the same domain might cause another penalty to be applied to the other content on the domain. **My Developer Says:**In recent years, we noticed that forum content had been penalized in favor of editorially reviewed content when this is identified by search engines.
Technical SEO | | Shop-Sq
What big hiccups would / could we encounter from combining these 3 types of platforms into one site?Many thanks for any direction or insight.0 -
URL Structure On Site - Currently it's domain/product-name NOT domain/category/product name is this bad?
I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Google's ability to crawl AJAX rendered content
I would like to make a change to the way our main navigation is currently rendered on our e-commerce site. Currently, all of the content that appears when you click a navigation category is rendering on page load. This is currently a large portion of every page visit’s bandwidth and even the images are downloaded even if a user doesn’t choose to use the navigation. I’d like to change it so the content appears and is downloaded only IF the user clicks on it, I'm planning on using AJAX. As that is the case it wouldn’t not be automatically on the site(which may or may not mean Google would crawl it). As we already provide a sitemap.xml for Google I want to make sure this change would not adversely affect our SEO. As of October this year the Webmaster AJAX crawling doc. suggestions has been depreciated. While the new version does say that its crawlers are smart enough to render AJAX content, something I've tested, I'm not sure if that only applies to content injected on page load as opposed to in click like I'm planning to do.
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Why are only PDFs on my client's site being indexed, and not actual pages?
My client has recently built a new site (we did not build this), which is a subdomain of their main site. The new site is: https://addstore.itelligencegroup.com/uk/en/. (Their main domain is: http://itelligencegroup.com/uk/) This new Addstore site has recently gone live (in the past week or so) and so far, Google appears to have indexed 56 pdf files that are on the site, but it hasn't indexed any of the actual web pages yet. I can't figure out why though. I've checked the robots.txt file for the site which appears to be fine: https://addstore.itelligencegroup.com/robots.txt. Does anyone have any ideas about this?
Technical SEO | | mfrgolfgti0 -
Wordpress 404 Errors
Hi Guys, One of my clients is scratching his head after a site migration. He has moved to wordpress and now GWT is creating weird and wonderful strange 404 errors. For example http://www.allsee-tech.com/digital-signage-blog/category/clients.html There are loads like the above which seem to be made up out of his blog and navigation http://www.allsee-tech.com/clients.html works! Any ideas? Is it a rogue plugin? How do we fix? Kind Regards Neil
Technical SEO | | nezona0 -
If Google's index contains multiple URLs for my homepage, does that mean the canonical tag is not working?
I have a site which is using canonical tags on all pages, however not all duplicate versions of the homepage are 301'd due to a limitation in the hosting platform. So some site visitors get www.example.com/default.aspx while others just get www.example.com. I can see the correct canonical tag on the source code of both versions of this homepage, but when I search Google for the specific URL "www.example.com/default.aspx" I see that they've indexed that specific URL as well as the "clean" one. Is this a concern... shouldn't Google only show me the clean URL?
Technical SEO | | JMagary0 -
What to do with 404 errors when you don't have a similar new page to 301 to ??
Hi If you have 404 errors for pages that you dont have similar content pages to 301 them to, should you just leave them (the 404's are optimised/qood quality with related links & branding etc) and they will eventually be de-indexed since no longer exist or should you 'remove url' in GWT ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Is it worth changing our blog post URL's?
We're considering changing the URL's for our blog posts and dropping the date information. Ex. http://spreecommerce.com/blog/2012/07/27/spree-1-1-3-released/ changes to http://spreecommerce.com/blog/spree-1-1-3-released/ Based on what I've learned here the new URL is better for SEO but since these pages already exist do we risk a minor loss of Google juice with 301 redirects? We have a sitemap for the blog posts so I imagine this wouldn't be too hard for Google to learn the new ones.
Technical SEO | | schof0