Whether letting an old category just 404 out is OK
-
Hello,
We've got some hidden categories that are still indexed in the search engines. If there are no links to these hidden categories, can we just let them 404 out and be OK SEO wise? We can't 301 redirect them. It's about 50 categories.
-
Hi Bob,
Just to extend on Jane's point and answer your question - if you 301 redirected every single page on your site, it would overtime slow down your website and if a lot of those pages don't have strong authority then it might be detected and potentially harm your sites rankings. A link to a quora post below provides additional reasons.
http://www.quora.com/Why-should-one-avoid-overusing-301-redirects
-
Hi Bob,
This is fine - Google recommends 404 / 410 for removing pages - if you want them gone even quicker, have them return 404s and use Google's page removal tool.
-
1. Why can't you 301 them?
2. If you want them out of the index, try a manual URL removal via Webmaster Tools.
-
Hey Bob,
If these pages have been clearly hidden in the first place, then from my perspective I already see no value in these pages.
Having non-important pages returning 404 error pages is ok. We only maintain the existing link juice or page authority for pages that have been taken down or reoptimised, in order to maintain existing SEO efforts or to direct users to an alternative page.
I hope this helps.
Regards,
Vahe
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
-
[SEO] Star Ratings -> Review -> Category Page
Hello there, Basically, if you put non-natural star ratings on the category page, like in the attached images, you will get manual ban from google right?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Shanaki
(i know it for sure, cause I had clients with this situation) The real question is:
If I put a form that allows users to write a review about the category products on the category page, for REAL, will google still ban? Any advice? Any example? With respect,
Andrei Irh0O kto4o0 -
Spam signals from old company site are hurting new company site, but we can't undo the redirect.
My client was forced to change its domain name last year (long story). We were largely able to regain our organic rankings via 301-redirects. Recently, the rankings for the new domain have begun to plummet. Nothing specific took place that could have caused any ranking declines on the new site. However, when we analyze links to the OLD site, we are seeing a lot of link spam being built to that old domain over recent weeks and months. We have no idea where these are coming from but they appear to be negatively impacting our new site. We cannot dismantle the redirects as the old site has hundreds, if not thousands, of quality links pointing to it, and many customers are accustomed to going to that home page. So those redirects need to stay in place. We have already disavowed all the spam we have found on the old Search Console. We are continuing to do so as we find new spam links. But what are we supposed to do about this spam negatively impacting our new site? FYI we have not received any messages in the search console.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | FPD_NYC1 -
Sudden influx of 404's affecting SERP's?
Hi Mozzers, We've recently updated a site of ours that really should be doing much better than it currently is. It's got a good backlink profile (and some spammy links recently removed), has age on it's side and has been SEO'ed a tremendous amount. (think deep-level, schema.org, site-speed and much, much more). Because of this, we assumed thin, spammy content was the issue and removed these pages, creating new, content-rich pages in the meantime. IE: We removed a link-wheel page; <a>https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Asuperted.com%2Fpopular-searches</a>, which as you can see had a **lot **of results (circa 138,000). And added relevant pages for each of our entertainment 'categories'.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ChimplyWebGroup
<a>http://www.superted.com/category.php/bands-musicians</a> - this page has some historical value, so the Mozbar shows some Page Authority here.
<a>http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/wedding-bands</a> - this is an example of a page linking from the above page. These are brand new URLs and are designed to provide relevant content. The old link-wheel pages contained pure links (usually 50+ on every page), no textual content, yet were still driving small amounts of traffic to our site.
The new pages contain quality and relevant content (ie - our list of Wedding Bands, what else would a searcher be looking for??) but some haven't been indexed/ranked yet. So with this in mind I have a few questions: How do we drive traffic to these new pages? We've started to create industry relevant links through our own members to the top-level pages. (http://www.superted.com/category.php/bands-musicians) The link-profile here _should _flow to some degree to the lower-level pages, right? We've got almost 500 'sub-categories', getting quality links to these is just unrealistic in the short term. How long until we should be indexed? We've seen an 800% drop in Organic Search traffic since removing our spammy link-wheel page. This is to be expected to a degree as these were the only real pages driving traffic. However, we saw this drop (and got rid of the pages) almost exactly a month ago, surely we should be re-indexed and re-algo'ed by now?! **Are we still being algor****hythmically penalised? **The old spammy pages are still indexed in Google (138,000 of them!) despite returning 404's for a month. When will these drop out of the rankings? If Google believes they still exist and we were indeed being punished for them, then it makes sense as to why we're still not ranking, but how do we get rid of them? I've tried submitting a manual removal of URL via WMT, but to no avail. Should I 410 the page? Have I been too hasty? I removed the spammy pages in case they were affecting us via a penalty. There would also have been some potential of duplicate content with the old and the new pages.
_popular-searches.php/event-services/videographer _may have clashed with _profiles.php/videographer, _for example.
Should I have kept these pages whilst we waited for the new pages to re-index? Any help would be extremely appreciated, I'm pulling my hair out that after following 'guidelines', we seem to have been punished in some way for it. I assumed we just needed to give Google time to re-index, but a month should surely be enough for a site with historical SEO value such as ours?
If anyone has any clues about what might be happening here, I'd be more than happy to pay for a genuine expert to take a look. If anyone has any potential ideas, I'd love to reward you with a 'good answer'. Many, many thanks in advance. Ryan.0 -
20-30% of our ecommerce categories contain no extra content, could this be a problem
Hello, About 20-30% of our ecommerce categories have no content beyond the products that are in them. Could this be a problem with Panda? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
301, 404 or 410? what is the best practice
Hi I'm currently working on a project to correct some really bad practices from years of different SEO's. Basically they had made around 1500 pages of delivery counties and town, only change 3 words on every page. Now apart from duplicate content issues, this has really hammered the site with the latest round of Panda updates. I've pulled the pages, but i'm in several frames of mind on how to best fix this. The pages won't ever be used again, so i'm thinking a 410 code would be best, but reading another post: http://moz.com/community/q/server-redirect-query i'm not sure if i should just let them go to 404's if anyone ever finds them. Incidentally i'm Disavowing over 1100 root domains, so extremely unlikely to find links out there.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eminent1 -
Are directory listings still appropriate in 2013? Aren't they old-style SEO and Penguin-worthy?
We have been reviewing our off-page SEO strategy for clients and as part of that process, we are looking at a number of superb info-graphics on the subject. I see that some of current ones still list "Directories" as being part of their off-page strategy. Aren't these directories mainly there for link-building purposes and provide Users no real benefit? I don't think I've ever seen a directory that I would use, apart for SEO research. Surely Google's Penguin algorithm would see directories in the same way and give them less value, or even penalise websites that use them to try to boost page rank? If I were to list my websites on directories it wouldn't be to share my lovely content with people that use directories to find great sites, it would be to sneakily build page rank. Am I missing the point? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Crumpled_Dog
Scott0 -
Will cleaning up old pr articles help serps?
For a few years we published articles with anchor text backlinks to about 10 different article submission sites. Each article was modified to create similar different articles. We have about 50 completely unique articles. This worked really well for our serps until google panda & penguin updates. I am looking for advice on whether I should have a major clean up of the published articles and if so should I be deleting them, removing or renaming anchor text backlinks? Any advice on what strategy would work best would be appreciated as I don't want to start deleting backlinks and making it worse. We used to enjoy position 1 but are now at 12-15 so have least most of our traffic.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | devoted2vintage0 -
How to transfer posts from a specific category into a subdomain
Hi Guys, Is there a way in Wordpress to transfer or redirect a category and all posts under it into a sub-domain? Thanks in advance..
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Trigun0