404 Errors
-
Do 404 Errors really have a lot of impact on rankings and over all authority of the site with google? Say you have a site that all the pages have moved apart from the home page which is exactly the same before moving? So most of your pages are showing 404 errros.
-
Hi Adul,
Just to follow up on this in case you're wondering why the answer is being downvoted. Blocking the pages that 404 in robots.txt will only stop Google getting a 404 because they can't reach the page. Users will still get a 404 so this isn't ideal. Also, if you don't 301 redirect the old pages to the new one, you lose any equity that those pages built up over the years.
Hope that helps,
Craig
-
Go to google webmaster tools, > Crawl > Crawl Error .. Download all page
Open excel and paste notepad robots.txt
User-agent: *
disallow: /page1.html
Disallow: /page2.html -
If no one can access your site except for the home page, that is pretty bad.
As to rankings, look at it from a broad perspective. A user clicks a link in search results. That link goes to a 404. They immediately go back and find someone else's site or link to click on. Another user clicks another link for the same broken site. They get a 404 error and do the same thing. Google bot comes along and sees that the site in question has a very low on-page time, and users frequently leave and go somewhere else. They also see a large quanity of the pages dont work.
If you were Google, would you give that site much weight or credit? Or would you hand it to a site that works? I don't think they openly express that it can hurt you, or that they will hurt your ranking for having 404 errors. IMO they do, it's just not as transparent as the rest of the things they state to do to improve your ranking.
-
OP, your case is an extreme one in that every page on the site but the homepage 404s. That means you moved but didn't do any 301 redirects, so that's an issue.
But generally, 404s have no impact on your site's ranking and that's been stated on record multiple times.
-
Hi, the 404 errors are pretty bad and en user experience standpoint and so Google does not like them. During domain migrations, the most important aspect is to control the number of 404 errors to the possible extent if not possible to make them zero.
When pages are moved, you should go in for a one-to-one or page-to-page server-side, 301 permanent redirection from the old pages to the corresponding new locations so that the old pages do not end-up in 404 errors and with 301 in place, Google will know that the old pages are no more in force and that they have been replaced by the new corresponding destinations. This will also make the old ones replaced by the new ones in search engine indices.
So to conclude, 404 errors are bad from both, the users and the search engines.
Hope it helps my friend.
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
-
Google robots.txt test - not picking up syntax errors?
I just ran a robots.txt file through "Google robots.txt Tester" as there was some unusual syntax in the file that didn't make any sense to me... e.g. /url/?*
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
/url/?
/url/* and so on. I would use ? and not ? for example and what is ? for! - etc. Yet "Google robots.txt Tester" did not highlight the issues... I then fed the sitemap through http://www.searchenginepromotionhelp.com/m/robots-text-tester/robots-checker.php and that tool actually picked up my concerns. Can anybody explain why Google didn't - or perhaps it isn't supposed to pick up such errors? Thanks, Luke0 -
301 or 404 Question for thin content Location Pages we want to remove
Hello All, I have a Hire Website with many categories and individual location pages for each of the 70 depots we operate. However, being dynamic pages, we have thousands of thin content pages. We have decided to only concentrate on our best performing locations and get rid of the rest as its physically impossible to write unique content for all our location pages for every categories. Therefore my question is. Would it cause me problems by having to many 301's for the location pages I am going to re-direct ( i was only going to send these back to the parent category page) or should I just 404 all those location pages and at some point in the future when we are in a position to concentrate on these locations then redo them with new content ? in terms of url numbers It would affect a few thousand 301's or 404's depending on people thoughts. Also , does anyone know what percentage of thin content on a site should be acceptable ?.. I know , none is best in an ideal world but it would be easier if there we could get away with a little percentage. We have been affected by Panda , so we are trying to tidy things up as best at possible, Any advice greatly appreciated? thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Site migration - 301 or 404 for pages no longer needed?
Hi I am migrating from my old website to a new one on a different, server with a very different domain and url structure. I know it's is best to change as little as possible but I just wasn't able to do that. Many of my pages can be redirected to new urls with similar or the same content. My old site has around 400 pages. Many of these pages/urls are no longer required on the new site - should I 404 these pages or 301 them to the homepage? I have looked through a lot of info online to work this out but cant seem to find a definative answer. Thanks for this!! James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Curran0 -
Is it a problem to use a 301 redirect to a 404 error page, instead of serving directly a 404 page?
We are building URLs dynamically with apache rewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
When we detect that an URL is matching some valid patterns, we serve a script which then may detect that the combination of parameters in the URL does not exist. If this happens we produce a 301 redirect to another URL which serves a 404 error page, So my doubt is the following: Do I have to worry about not serving directly an 404, but redirecting (301) to a 404 page? Will this lead to the erroneous original URL staying longer in the google index than if I would serve directly a 404? Some context. It is a site with about 200.000 web pages and we have currently 90.000 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (even though only 600 detected last month).0 -
Www vs. non-www differences in crawl errors in Webmaster tools...
Hey All, I have been working on an eCommerce site for a while that to no avail, continues to make me want to hang myself. To make things worth the developers just do not understand SEO and it seems every change they make just messes up work we've already done. Job security I guess. Anywho,most recently we realized they had some major sitemap issues as almost 3000 pages were submitted by only 20 or so were indexed. Well, they updated the sitemap and although all the pages are properly indexing, I now have 5000+ "not found" crawl errors in the non-www version of WMT and almost none in the www version of the WMT account. Anyone have insight as to why this would be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RossFruin0 -
Why do pages with a 404 error drop out of webmaster tools only to reappear again?
I have noticed a lot of pages which have fallen out of webmaster tools crawl error log that had bee 404'ing are reappearing again Any suggestions as to why this might be the case? How can I make sure they don't reappear again?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
redirect 404 pages to homepage
Hello, I'm puting a new website on a existing domain. In order to not loose the links that point to the varios old url I would like to redirect them to homepage. The old website was a mess as there was no seo and the pages didn't target any keywords. Thats why I would like to redirect all links to home. What do you think is the best way to do this ? I tried to ad this in the .htaccess but it's not working; ErrorDocument 404 /index.php Con you tell me how it exacly look? Now the hole file is like this: @package Joomla @copyright Copyright (C) 2005 - 2012 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved. @license GNU General Public License version 2 or later; see LICENSE.txt READ THIS COMPLETELY IF YOU CHOOSE TO USE THIS FILE! The line just below this section: 'Options +FollowSymLinks' may cause problems with some server configurations. It is required for use of mod_rewrite, but may already be set by your server administrator in a way that dissallows changing it in your .htaccess file. If using it causes your server to error out, comment it out (add # to beginning of line), reload your site in your browser and test your sef url's. If they work, it has been set by your server administrator and you do not need it set here. Can be commented out if causes errors, see notes above. Options +FollowSymLinks Mod_rewrite in use. RewriteEngine On Begin - Rewrite rules to block out some common exploits. If you experience problems on your site block out the operations listed below This attempts to block the most common type of exploit attempts to Joomla! Block out any script trying to base64_encode data within the URL. RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} base64_encode[^(]([^)]) [OR] Block out any script that includes a
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | igrizo0 -
Managing 404 errors
What is the best way to manage 404 errors for pages that are no longer on the server. For example, client deletes old site from server and replaces it with new site. Webmaster tools is reporting 100 + 404 errors form the old site. I've blocked the 404 pages with robot.text. Requested removal in google webmaster tools. And created a custom 404 page - http://www.tvsphoto.com/missingurlexample Is there anything else I can do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOProPhoto0