What to do with removed pages and 404 error
-
I recently removed about 600 'thin' pages from my site which are now showing as 404 errors in WMT as expected. As I understand it I should just let these pages 404 and eventually they'll be dropped from the index. There are no inbound links pointing at them so I don't need to 301 them. They keep appearing in WMT as 404's though so should I just 'mark as fixed' until they stop appearing? Is there any other action I need to take?
-
If they are truly gone, then a 410 would be the best option for you. Since they are indexed even if there are no links pointing at them, people can still find them besed upon what they are searching for. You never know when your link will show up, because you dont know how long google is going to take to get rid of the links.
http://www.checkupdown.com/status/E410.html
"The 410 error is primarily intended to assist the task of Web maintenance by notifying the client system that the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the Web server wants remote links to the URL to be removed. Such an event is common for URLs which are effectively dead i.e. were deliberately time-limited or simply orphaned. The Web server has complete discretion as to how long it provides the 410 error before switching to another error such as 404"
We did this for a client that needed old defunct pages removed. Once you set the pages to return a 410, and use Google url removal tool, you should see them dropping off really quick. (all of ours were gone within a month) Having that many pages return a 404 may be hurting the experience of your users as when they see a 404, they go right for the back button.
-
410 is the recommended way to tell search engines the page is gone. all of the things mentioned above are a facet of how you should deal with this issue. sorry for the brevity and terrible punction. moz forum is a pretty iffy thing via mobile. my eggs are getting cold.
-
Hi!
The reason why these pages keep popping up in WMT is that they have already been indexed. You could try to remove them from Google's index by using the removal tool in WMT (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/url-removal) or by setting up "301 Redirect" for them to more ideal pages.
Hope this helps
Anders -
Hi,
I would look at this from two perspectives.
1. These thins pages could have been beefed-up with some unique content or at least the content could have been re-written to make them unique. Personally, I prefer to make the duplicate pages unique instead of deleting them.This of course depends on the number of pages and the level of duplication.
2. Now that these pages have been removed from the website, you should be erasing all the links to these from within the website from all the places like, sitemaps and internal linking so that the search engines do not find a link pointing to them that might end-up in a 404 error. You should also consider if there have been any references left to these pages from third-party web properties.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
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
-
Should we rename and update a page or create a new page entirely?
Hi Moz Peoples! We have a small site with a simple site navigation, with only a few links on the nav bar. We have been doing some work to create a new page, which will eventually replace one of the links on the nav bar. The question we are having is, is it better to rename the existing page and replace its content and then wait for the great indexer to do its thing, or perm delete the page and replace it with the new page and content? Or is this a case where it really makes no difference as long as the redirects are set up correctly?
On-Page Optimization | | Parker8180 -
Google Search Console issue: "This is how Googlebot saw the page" showing part of page being covered up
Hi everyone! Kind of a weird question here but I'll ask and see if anyone else has seen this: In Google Search Console when I do a fetch and render request for a specific site, the fetch and blocked resources all look A-OK. However, in the render, there's a large grey box (background of navigation) that covers up a significant amount of what is on the page. Attaching a screenshot. You can see the text start peeking out below (had to trim for confidentiality reasons). But behind that block of grey IS text. And text that apparently in the fetch part Googlebot does see and can crawl. My question: is this an issue? Should I be concerned about this visual look? Or no? Never have experienced an issue like that. I will say - trying to make a play at a featured snippet and can't seem to have Google display this page's information, despite it being the first result and the query showing a featured snippet of a result #4. I know that it isn't guaranteed for the #1 result but wonder if this has anything to do with why it isn't showing one. VmIqgFB.png
On-Page Optimization | | ChristianMKG0 -
Duplicate Page content | What to do?
Hello Guys, I have some duplicate pages detected by MOZ. Most of the URL´s are from a registracion process for users, so the URL´s are all like this: www.exemple.com/user/login?destination=node/125%23comment-form What should I do? Add this to robot txt? If so how? Whats the command to add in Google Webmaster? Thanks in advance! Pedro Pereira
On-Page Optimization | | Kalitenko20140 -
To create extra pages, or not to create extra pages?
I'm responsible for a site where we cater for all kinds of medical & legal problems. I recently conducted keyword research that shows a lot of questions being 'asked' in relation to the conditions we cater for. Naturally, I want to create content to answer these questions. We have a page for 'Cancer compensation' - the 'possible content' that answers questions won't necessarily help someone claiming compensation for cancer mistreatment, BUT someone who asks a question relating to cancer, answered in the 'possible content' may find the 'cancer compensation' page useful. SO! Do I: Add this content to the existing 'cancer compensation' page? Create individual pages of content answering each question, linking to the 'cancer compensation' page? or do I amalgamate all the answers into one heafty 'resource' page that sits elsewhere on the site? What do you think? Thanks in advance. John King
On-Page Optimization | | Muhammad-Isap0 -
Does having landing page text beneath the products at the base of the page hinder SEO?
I have a site that is capable of hosting the landing page description either above the products under the H1 or below them at the bottom of the page before the footer. I have always chosen to keep the text "above the fold" as presumably this would be crawled sooner in relation to the rest of the page content than had it been at the bottom. However, this means that I can only really write just a few sentences for each landing page - otherwise the products would shift further down the page - and I don't think this is good from a UX POV. Question: If I move the bulk of my landing page descriptions to the text snippet located underneath the products, could this negatively affect my SEO? Text at the bottom of the page is obviously not significant for users, so is there a chance this could be seen as spam?
On-Page Optimization | | Silkstream0 -
Apache Rewrite to remove page name extensions
If I use Apache Rewrite to remove my file extensions from my pages will Google view those pages as new? Do I have to also 301 redirect from the "page-name.htm" to "page-name"? I'd like to change my pages from html to php to make my life a little easier but I'm worried about losing link juice if I were to 301 on every page. Thanks -Brandon
On-Page Optimization | | TRICORSystems0 -
Links to Product pages
Hello all, I am still rather new to SEO and learning a lot every day. I do have a question. On our product search result pages (example http://shop.ferguson.com/search/bathroom-lighting)
On-Page Optimization | | Ferguson
It is currently set up so the image, text, price etc of a product is linking to that product page. Our question is, if we were to link the image and the product name - will this be seen as two links to the same page? Is this a bad thing having multiple links to the same page? I searched around to see how other ecommerce sites have similar pages setup and it seems they link the image and also the product name, and the description is not click-able, which allows a user to "Highlight" the text (this is not possible on ours) Which would be to correct approach for SEO as well as User Interface, the way we have it set up, or by going with the method of the question I asked, Thank you for any information on this! Nick0 -
Page Rank
I had just made a 301 re-direct on one of our product pages which had a PR of 4, now that Google has indexed the new page, it's now got a PR of 0, i'm struggling to understand why this could be, i know that you may see a drop of 1, which has happened in the past, but this drop just does not make sense. Any ideas of why this could be? Kind Regards
On-Page Optimization | | Paul780