How do I get rid of crawl errors?
-
I recently revamped all my category pages to make them Google friendly. I did a lot of keyword research and ended up deleting categories and renaming categories. Now Google Webmasters is showing a ton of 404 errors. How can I get rid of them? Do I have to remove the URL one by one with Google Webmasters? Is it something that won't hurt my rankings and will go away in time?
-
I haven't used a specific WP plugin which I could recommend, but I did a quick search and found the following which may work for you:
http://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-301-redirects/
As for whether it's alright to link some to your homepage, certainly. My recommendation would be to redirect to the page that is closest in topic to what your old page was about. If that's your homepage, that's fine. If you have category page that is related, that's better. If you have a page that is covering the exact same topic, that's best. Just choose the best option available.
The other consideration is time. If we're talking about thousands and thousands of redirects, then you may just be best off redirecting to your homepage and saving hours and hours of work. Either that or outsourcing the work.
Good luck. If you find a good plugin that does what you need, let us know what plugin you used.
-
I am using Wordpress. I am hoping there is a plugin that makes it easy to deal with this? Any recommendations?Can I just redirect some of them to the homepage? They don't all have a new, relevant category to redirect to.
-
301 redirects is definitely the way to go. How to do it will depend on the platform in the system that you're using. For example, I'm using Linux servers with a cPanel platform and I'm able to set up a .htaccess file and put the redirects in that .htaccess file. I know Microsoft servers have a similar file, though I can't remember the .name of it.
So, depending on your system and on how much access you have to the servers and the server files, you may be able to set up something like about .ht access or you might have to set something up within your website itself. So, it's difficult to say without knowing what your actual system is, but you definitely want to be setting up 301 redirects for those URLs that are sending 404 errors.
-
Some platforms have a built-in 301 tool and all you have to do is upload the xml file with the proper redirects like so:
/source-category.htm/target-category.htm -
How? I suppose I should have done that instead of deleting them.
-
Sounds like you need to set up 301 redirects from your old URLs to the the new relevant ones.
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
-
Crawl Report shows Internal links as zero
We have recently updated our website (https://www.payumoney.com/) and created new pages like "https://www.payumoney.com/free-payment-gateway-India.html". we have internally linked all the pages, but when I check the crawl report from MOZ it shows internal links as 0 and these pages have the PA of 1 and not increasing. I am unable to find out the reason why is it happening?
On-Page Optimization | | payu_india0 -
Crawl errors
Hi I have the following errors on my site and was wondering would it help improve my ranking to fix : Missing Meta Description Tag 137Duplicate Page Title 17Title Element is Too Long 6Temporary Redirect 3
On-Page Optimization | | WallerD0 -
404 errors in wordpress... Pages have never existed so why is google trying to crawl them?
I've just logged into webmaster tools and have over 100 404 errors. I'm running wordpress and I recently added child pages to 2 of my categories like so. www.mydomain.com/category1/lincolnshire www.mydomain.com/category1/cambridgeshire etc... The 404 errors though are for pages or categories I've never created though. I have over 20 root categories but decided to test adding child pages to only two of them. The 404 errors are for www.mydomain.com/category5/cambridgeshire .... It seem that gogle has tried to crawl these pages that don't exist. Can anyone explain what's going on? When I click 'linked from' in webmaster tools it's showing links from pages on my site that don't exist also.
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
Getting Google to see major changes?
I am making some big changes to my site based on Moz's advice. How can I get google to see all of them? I submitted them to Google Webmasters. Is that the best thing to do? How long until Google updates all my pages?
On-Page Optimization | | dealblogger0 -
Handling a Huge Amount of Crawl Errors
HI all, I am faced with a crawl errors issue of a huge site (>1MiO pages) for which I am doing On-page Audit. 404 Erorrs: >80'000 Soft 404 Errors: 300 500 Errors: 1600 All of the above reported in GWT. Many of the error links are simply not present on the pages "linked from". I investigated a sample of pages (and their source) looking for the error links footprints and yet nothing. What would be the right way to address this issue from SEO perspective, anyway? Clearly. I am not able to investigate the reasons since I am seeing what is generated as HTML and NOT seeing what's behind. So my question is: Generally, what is the appropriate way of handling this? Telling the client that he has to investigate that (I gave my best to at least report the errors) Engaging my firm further and get a developer from my side to investigate? Thanks in advance!!
On-Page Optimization | | spiderz0 -
Getting access to clients websites for onsite seo
I understand on site seo fine, as I have tweeked up my own website a fair bit. But I am thinking about doing Onsite and Offsite SEO for clients, as I have had a few request now. So my question is what is the best way to get access to clients websites. So I can make the required adjustments. I have one client, who had a company create a website for him, but they have since closed down.
On-Page Optimization | | aussieseoguy0 -
I have home tab in 2 menu's which calls the same hompage article. How do I get over this
I am getting duplicate content for this article. I need 'home' tab on two menus.
On-Page Optimization | | rajendraksh0