Remove Deleted (but indexed) Pages Through Webmaster Tools?
-
I run a blog/directory site. Recently, I changed directory software and, as a result, Google is showing 404 Not Found crawling errors for about 750 non-existent pages.
I've had some suggest that I should implement a 301 redirect, but can't see the wisdom in this as the pages are obscure, unlikely to appear in search and they've been deleted.
Is the best course to simply manually enter each 404 error page in to the Remove Page option in Webmaster Tools? Will entering deleted pages into the Removal area hurt other healthy pages on my site?
-
The best course of action is to 301 all of the pages as:
- There may be some links to these pages
- These pages may presently be carrying some authority which would be transferred to the new pages (i.e. where the 301 resolves)
-
The best course is to 301 redirect them which is what most (and Google) will suggest. Even though they're obscure you'll still get a certain amount of PR/link juice from redirecting them. If you're not worried about them lining up to contemporary pages, you could direct them all to your home page.
If you absolutely don't want to do any 301s, you can use Webmaster Tools and it won't hurt your healthy pages. You should also consider making a custom 404 page that helps with the transition to the new software.
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
-
Alternatives 301? Issues redirection of index.html page with Adobe Business Catalyst
Hi Moz community, As for now we have two different versions of a client's homepage that’s dividing our traffic. One of the urls is the index.html version of the other url. We are using Adobe Business Catalyst for one of our clients and they told us they can’t 301 redirect. Adobe Business Catalyst does 301 redirects, but not to itself like an .htaccess rewrite. Doing a 301 redirect using BC from index.html to / creates an infinite loop and break the page. Are there alternatives to a 301 or any suggestions how to solve this? Thanks for all your answers and thoughts in advance,
Technical SEO | | Anna_Hoesl
Anna0 -
Webmaster Tools - How to Change Site Owner When Owner is MIA
I started working with a client about a year and a half ago. I had the computer guy who setup the website for my client grant me access to webmaster tools. When I added the site, I have "Restricted Access" I kind of dropped the ball in following up with him and now, there is no response from his email and the hosting provider website is down. Is there any way to get his non working email off as owner and make me the owner?
Technical SEO | | Czubmeister0 -
Page Indexing increase when I request Google Site Link demote
Hi there, Has anyone seen a page crawling increase in Google Web Master Tools when they have requested a site link demotion? I did this around the 23rd of March, the next day I started to see page crawling rise and rise and report a very visible spike in activity and to this day is still relatively high. From memory I have asked about this in SEOMOZ Q&A a couple of years ago in and was told that page crawl activity is a good thing - ok fine, no argument. However at the nearly in the same period I have noticed that my primary keyword rank for my home page has dropped away to something in the region of 4th page on Google US and since March has stayed there. However the exact same query in Google UK (Using SEOMOZ Rank Checker for this) has remained the same position (around 11th) - it has barely moved. I decided to request an undemote on GWT for this page link and the page crawl started to drop but not to the level before March 23rd. However the rank situation for this keyword term has not changed, the content on our website has not changed but something has come adrift with our US ranks. Using Open Site Explorer not one competitor listed has a higher domain authority than our site, page authority, domain links you name it but they sit there in first page. Sorry the above is a little bit of frustration, this question is not impulsive I have sat for weeks analyzing causes and effects but cannot see why this disparity is happening between the 2 country ranks when it has never happened for this length of time before. Ironically we are still number one in the United States for a keyword phrase which I moved away from over a month ago and do not refer to this phrase at all on our index page!! Bizarre. Granted, site link demotion may have no correlation to the KW ranking impact but looking at activities carried out on the site and timing of the page crawling. This is the only sizable factor I can identify that could be the cause. Oh! and the SEOMOZ 'On-Page Optimization Tool' reports that the home page gets an 'A' for this KW term. I have however this week commented out the canonical tag for the moment in the index page header to see if this has any effect. Why? Because as this was another (if not minor) change I employed to get the site to an 'A' credit with the tool. Any ideas, help appreciated as to what could be causing the rank differences. One final note the North American ranks initially were high, circa 11-12th but then consequently dropped away to 4th page but not the UK rankings, they witnessed no impact. Sorry one final thing, the rank in the US is my statistical outlier, using Google Analytics I have an average rank position of about 3 across all countries where our company appears for this term. Include the US and it pushes the average to 8/9th. Thanks David
Technical SEO | | David-E-Carey0 -
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 -
Webmaster Tools Server Error
We recently did a build to our site and after the build the build one of the softwares that we are using changed. This caused our server errors to go into the thousands. right now google webmaster tools gave us a list of top 1,000 pages with errors and we fixed them all is there a way to see the rest of the errors?
Technical SEO | | DoRM0 -
Pages noindex'ed. Submit removal request too?
We had a bunch of catalog pages "noindex,follow" 'ed. Now should we also submit removal request in WMT for these pages? Thank you! LL
Technical SEO | | LocalLocal0 -
How to get Google to index another page
Hi, I will try to make my question clear, although it is a bit complex. For my site the most important keyword is "Insurance" or at least the danish variation of this. My problem is that Google are'nt indexing my frontpage on this, but are indexing a subpage - www.mydomain.dk/insurance instead of www.mydomain.dk. My link bulding will be to subpages and to my main domain, but i wont be able to get that many links to www.mydomain.dk/insurance. So im interested in making my frontpage the page that is my main page for the keyword insurance, but without just blowing the traffic im getting from the subpage at the moment. Is there any solutions to do this? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Petersen110 -
Over 1000 pages de-indexed over night
Hello, On my site (www.bridgman.co.uk) we had a lot of duplicate page issues as reported by the Seomoz site report tool - this was due to database driven URL strings. As a result, I sent an excel file with all the duplicate pages to my web developer who put rel canonical tags on what I assumed would be all the correct pages. I am not sure if this is a coincidence, or a direct result of the canonical tags, but a few days after (yesterday) the amount of pages indexed by google dropped from 1,200 to under 200. The number is still declining, and other than the canonical tags I can't work out why Google would just start de-indexing most of our pages. If you could offer any solutions that would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Robert.
Technical SEO | | 87ROB0