Should i fix 404 my errors?
-
We have about 250, 404 errors due to changing alot of page names throughout our site.
I've read some articles saying to leave them and eventually they will go away. Normally I would do a 301 redirect.
What's the best solution?
-
I would do this. I personally don't think 250 404's is too much to knock out within a few hours. If you were in the thousands it would be a different concern.
Use excel to make this faster and 301
-
You can see the corresponding correct page against the 404 error page
Been the number of pages are high as you said, Make an entry in excel to note down all these 404 error pages and corresponding new page on the site
Then simply apply 301 redirect to the corresponding pages
-
If it's at all possible to redirect to a relevant page, I would do that. If the 404s are for pages that are no longer relevant, or old content you really don't want people to be able to find any more, then a 404 is just fine.
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
-
Default Wordpress 301 Redirects of JS and CSS files. Bad for SEO & How to Fix?
Hi there: We are developers with some digital marketing expertise, but a current issue has us perplexed. An outside SEO firm has asked us to clean up a large number of 301 redirects. Most of these are 'default' Wordpress behavior that relate to calling the latest version of a JS or CSS file. For instance, a JS file is called with this: https://websitexyz.com/wp-includes/js/wp-embed.min.js?ver=4.9.1 but ultimately redirects to this: https://websitexyz.com/wp-includes/js/wp-embed.min.js. We are being asked to prevent the redirect from happening by, presumably, calling the ultimate file to begin with. The issue is that, as far as we know, there's no easy way to alter WP behavior to call the ultimate file to begin with. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Thousands of 503 errors in GSC for pages not important to organic search - Is this a problem?
Hi, folks A client of mine now has roughly 30 000 503-errors (found in the crawl error section of GSC). This is mostly pages with limited offers and deals. The 503 error seems to occur when the offers expire, and when the page is of no use anymore. These pages are not important for organic search, but gets traffic from direct and newsletters, mostly. My question:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
Does having a high number of 503 pages reported in GSC constitute a problem in terms of organic ranking for the domain and the category and product pages (the pages that I want to rank for organically)? If it does, what is the best course of action to mitigate the problem? Looking excitingly forward to your answers to this 🙂 Sigurd0 -
404's and Ecommerce - Products no longer for sale
Hi We regularly have products which are no longer sold and discontinued. As we have such a large site, webmaster tools regularly picks up new 404's. These 404 pages aren't linked to from anywhere on the site any longer, however WMT will still report them as errors. Does this affect site authority? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Google Seeing 301 as 404
Hi all, We recently migrated a few small sites into one larger site and generally we had no problems. We read a lot of blogs before hand, 301'd the old links etc and we've been keeping an eye on any 404s. What we have found is that Webmaster is picking up quite a few 404s, yet when we investigate these 404s they are 301'd and work fine. This isn't for every url, but Google is finding more and I just want to catch any problems before they get out of hand. Is there any reason why Google would count a 301 as a 404? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB170 -
Should we get our W3 Validation Errors Fixed for SEO. How important is it ?
Hi All, We implement most things on our Website that is recommended and most recently we did Schema.org. However, one area which we haven't done is fix our W3 Validation Errors. My developer thinks they are not so as such and it's more about ticking the boxes but does anymore have any experience whereby fixing all these did actually have an SEO /Ranking Benefit ?.. Most of our URL'S are indexed and google recrawls regularly so I am not sure as to it's importance. Also we have a mobile responsive version so I wasn't sure if it more important because of this. From what I read, I can't see to any benefit from fixing it all but just wanted some other opinions? thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Any downsides of (permanent)redirecting 404 pages to more generic pages(category page)
Hi, We have a site which is somewhat like e-bay, they have several categories and advertisements posted by customers/ client. These advertisements disappear over time and turn into 404 pages. We have the option to redirect the user to the corresponding category page, but we're afraid of any negative impact of this change. Are there any downsides, and is this really the best option we have? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vhendriks0 -
URL errors in Google Webmaster Tool
Hi Within Google Webmaster Tool 'Crawl errors' report by clicking 'Not found' it shows 404 errors its found. By clicking any column headings and it will reorder them. One column is 'Priority' - do you think Google is telling me its ranked the errors in priority of needing a fix? There is no reference to this in the Webmaster tool help. Many thanks Nigel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Richard5551 -
How important is it to fix Server Errors?
I know it is important to fix server errors. We are trying to figure out how important because after our last build we have over 19,646 of them and since google only gives us a 1000 at a time the fastest way to tell them we have fixed them all is to use the api etc which will take time. WE are trying to decide is it more important to fix all these errors right now or focus on other issues and fix these errors when we have time, they are mostly ajax errors. Could this hurt our rankings? Any thoughts would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoRM0