Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Using disavow tool for 404s

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Using disavow tool for 404s

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    5
    1026
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • IceIcebaby
      IceIcebaby last edited by

      Hey Community,

      Got a question about the disavow tool for you. My site is getting thousands of 404 errors from old blog/coupon/you name it sites linking to our old URL structure (which used underscores and ended in .jsp).

      It seems like the webmasters of these sites aren't answering back or haven't updated their sites in ages so it's returning 404 errors. If I disavow these domains and/or links will it clear out these 404 errors in Google? I read the GWT help page on it, but it didn't seem to answer this question.

      Feel free to ask any questions that may help you understand the issue more.

      Thanks for your help,
      -Reed

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • IceIcebaby
        IceIcebaby last edited by

        Hey Doug, had another question for you. A big majority (90% of 18,000+ errors) of our 404 errors are coming from .jsp files from our old website.

        Of course, it's not ideal to manually update or redirect these, but possibly write a script to automatically change them. Would it be beneficial to add this .jsp to our robots.txt file?

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • IceIcebaby
          IceIcebaby last edited by

          Thanks Doug, really helpful answer.

          I am getting thousands of 404's but when I dive into them the majority of the 404 URLs can't be found in any of the "linked from" examples GWT gives me.

          I think 301 redirects are the best option like you said and/or having a good 404 page.

          Thanks,
          -Reed

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • DougRoberts
            DougRoberts last edited by

            The disavow tool isn't going to "fix" these 404s.

            404's aren't always a bad thing. The warnings in GWT are just there to make you aware that there's potentially a problem with your site. It doesn't mean there IS a problem.

            Is there content on your site that visitors clicking on these links should be arriving at? In which case you want to implement 301 redirects so that your visitors arrive on the most appropriate pate.

            If there's nothing relevant on the site any more - a 404 error is perfectly acceptable.

            Of course, you want to make sure that your 404 page gives the visitors the best chance/incentive to dig into the content on your site. Adding a nice obvious search box and/or links to most popular content may be a good idea. If you're getting lots of visitors from a particular site that you can maybe tailor your 404 message depending on the referrer.

            The drawback here is that links pointing at 404 error pages won't pass link-equity. If there is value in the links, and you're happy that they're going to be seen a natural/authentic as far as google is concerned then you can always 301 redirect these.

            Where you really should pay attention is where you have internal links on your site that are reporting 404s. These are under your control and you really don't want to give you visitors a poor experience with lots of broken links on your site.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • WilliamKammer
              WilliamKammer last edited by

              I wouldn't recommend using the disavow tool for this. The disavow tool is used to clean up spammy links that were not gained naturally.

              A better solution is to use 301 redirects and redirect the 404'd pages to the new pages that work on your website. That way users will land where they should if they click the links, and Google will still give you juice from those links.

              Here's a place to get started on how t do that: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633?hl=en

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
              • 1 / 1
              • First post
                Last post

              Got a burning SEO question?

              Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


              Start my free trial


              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.

              • See all categories

              Related Questions

              • Ibis15

                How safe is it to use a meta-refresh to hide the referrer?

                Hi guys, So I have a review site and I'm affiliated with several partnership programs whose products I advertise on my site. I don't want these affiliate programs to see the source of my traffic (my site), so I'm looking for a safe solution to hide the referrer URL. I have recently added a rel="noreferrer" tag to all my affiliate links, but this method isn't perfect as not all browsers respect that rule. After doing some research and checking my competitors I noticed that some of them use meta-refresh, which seems more reliable in this regard. So, how safe is it to use meta-refresh as means of hiding referrer URL? I'm worrying that implementing a meta-refresh redirect might negatively affect my SEO. Does anybody have any suggestions on how to hide the referrer URL without damaging SEO? Thank you.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ibis15
                0
              • Kingalan1

                How Many Links to Disavow at Once When Link Profile is Very Spammy?

                We are using link detox (Link Research Tools) to evaluate our domain for bad links. We ran a Domain-wide Link Detox Risk report. The reports showed a "High Domain DETOX RISK" with the following results: -42% (292) of backlinks with a high or above average detox risk
                -8% (52) of backlinks with an average of below above average detox risk
                -12% (81) of backlinks with a low or very low detox risk
                -38% (264) of backlinks were reported as disavowed. This look like a pretty bad link profile. Additionally, more than 500 of the 689 backlinks are "404 Not Found", "403 Forbidden", "410 Gone", "503 Service Unavailable". Is it safe to disavow these? Could Google be penalizing us for them> I would like to disavow the bad links, however my concern is that there are so few good links that removing bad links will kill link juice and really damage our ranking and traffic. The site still  ranks for terms that are not very competitive. We receive about 230 organic visits a week. Assuming we need to disavow about 292 links, would it be safer to disavow 25 per month while we are building new links so we do not radically shift the link profile all at once? Also, many of the bad links are 404 errors or page not found errors. Would it be OK to run a disavow of these all at once? Any risk to that? Would we be better just to build links and leave the bad links ups? Alternatively, would disavowing the bad links potentially help our traffic? It just seems risky because the overwhelming majority of links are bad.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
                0
              • khi5

                Using a lot of "Read More" Hidden text

                My site has a LOT of "read more" and when a user click they will see a lot of text. "read more" is dark blue bold and clear to the user. It is the perfect for the user experience, since right below I have pictures and videos which is what most users want. Question: I expect few users will click "Read more" (however, some users will appreciate chance to read and learn more) and I wonder if search engines may think I am hiding text and this is a risky approach or simply discount the text as having zero value from an SEO perspective? Or, equally important: If the text was NOT hidden with a "Read more" would the text actually carry more SEO value than if it is hidden under a "read more" even though users will NOT read the text anyway? If yes, reason may be: when the text is not hidden, search engines cannot see that users are not reading it and the text carry more weight from an SEO perspective than pages where text is hidden under a "Read more" where users rarely click "read more".

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi5
                0
              • khi5

                Will Google View Using Google Translate As Duplicate?

                If I have a page in English, which exist on 100 other websites, we have a case where my website has duplicate content. What if I use Google Translate to translate the page from English to Japanese, as the only website doing this translation will my page get credit for producing original content? Or, will Google view my page as duplicate content, because Google can tell it is translated from an original English page, which runs on 100+ different websites, since Google Translate is Google's own software?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi5
                0
              • Coraltoes77

                Disavow first (and link removal outreach second) as tactic?

                I need to remove/disavow hundreds of domains due to an algorithmic penalty.  Has anyone disavowed first and done the outreach thing second as a tactic? The reason why I was considering this was as follows: Most of the websites are from spammy websites and unlikely to have monitored accounts/available contact details. My business is incredibly seasonal, only being easily profitable for half of the year. The season starts from next month so the window of opportunity to get it done is small. If there's a Penguin update before I get it done, then it could be very bad news. Any thoughts would be much appreciated. (Incidentally, if you are interested in, I also posted here about it: http://moz.com/community/q/honest-thoughts-needed-about-link-building-removal)

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Coraltoes77
                0
              • HaCos

                Use of subdomains, subdirectories or both?

                Hello, i would like your advice on a dilemma i am facing. I am working a new project that is going to release soon,  thats a network of users with personal profiles seperated in categories for example lets say the categories are colors. So let say i am a member and i belong in red color categorie and i got a page where i update my personal information/cv/resume as well as a personal blog thats on that page. So the main site is giving the option to user to search for members by the criteria of color. My first idea is that all users should own a subdomain (and this is how its developed so far) thats easy to use and since the domain name is really small (just 3 letters) i believe subdomain worth since personal site will be easy to remember. My dilemma is should all users own a subdomain, a subdirectory or both and if both witch one should be the canonical? Since it said that search engines treat subdomains as different stand-alone sites, whats best for the main site? to show multiple search results with profiles in subdomains or subdirectories? What if i use both? meaning in search results i use search directory url for each profile while same time each profile owns a subdomains as well? and if so which one should be the canonical? Thanks in advance, C

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HaCos
                0
              • BeytzNet

                Should I use both Google and Bing's Webmaster Tools at the same time?

                Hi All, Up till now I've been registered only to Google WMT. Do you recommend using at the same time Bing's WMT? Thanks

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
                0
              • donthe

                Paging. is it better to use noindex, follow

                Is it better to use the robots meta noindex, follow tag for paging, (page 2, page 3) of Category Pages which lists items within each category or just let Google index these pages Before Panda I was not using noindex because I figured if page 2 is in Google's index then the items on page 2 are more likely to be in Google's index. Also then each item has an internal link So after I got hit by panda, I'm thinking well page 2 has no unique content only a list of links with a short excerpt from each item which can be found on each items page so it's not unique content, maybe that contributed to Panda penalty. So I place the meta tag noindex, follow on every page 2,3 for each category page. Page 1 of each category page has a short introduction so i hope that it is enough to make it "thick" content (is that a word :-))  My visitors don't want long introductions, it hurts bounce rate and time on site. Now I'm wondering if that is common practice and if items on page 2 are less likely to be indexed since they have no internal links from an indexed page Thanks!

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donthe
                0

              Get started with Moz Pro!

              Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

              Start my free trial
              Products
              • Moz Pro
              • Moz Local
              • Moz API
              • Moz Data
              • STAT
              • Product Updates
              Moz Solutions
              • SMB Solutions
              • Agency Solutions
              • Enterprise Solutions
              • Digital Marketers
              Free SEO Tools
              • Domain Authority Checker
              • Link Explorer
              • Keyword Explorer
              • Competitive Research
              • Brand Authority Checker
              • Local Citation Checker
              • MozBar Extension
              • MozCast
              Resources
              • Blog
              • SEO Learning Center
              • Help Hub
              • Beginner's Guide to SEO
              • How-to Guides
              • Moz Academy
              • API Docs
              About Moz
              • About
              • Team
              • Careers
              • Contact
              Why Moz
              • Case Studies
              • Testimonials
              Get Involved
              • Become an Affiliate
              • MozCon
              • Webinars
              • Practical Marketer Series
              • MozPod
              Connect with us

              Contact the Help team

              Join our newsletter
              Moz logo
              © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
              • Accessibility
              • Terms of Use
              • Privacy

              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.