Do 404s really 'lose' link juice?
-
It doesn't make sense to me that a 404 causes a loss in link juice, although that is what I've read. What if you have a page that is legitimate -- think of a merchant oriented page where you sell an item for a given merchant --, and then the merchant closes his doors. It makes little sense 5 years later to still have their merchant page so why would removing them from your site in any way hurt your site? I could redirect forever but that makes little sense. What makes sense to me is keeping the page for a while with an explanation and options for 'similar' products, and then eventually putting in a 404. I would think the eventual dropping out of the index actually REDUCES the overall link juice (ie less pages), so there is no harm in using a 404 in this way. It also is a way to avoid the site just getting bigger and bigger and having more and more 'bad' user experiences over time.
Am I looking at it wrong?
ps I've included this in 'link building' because it is related in a sense -- link 'paring'.
-
Thanks Amelia!
-
I may be being pedantic here but I think the correct status code should be 410 not 404 if the page has gone for good and you don't have a relevant place to redirect traffic to, as per the scenario described.
I believe if Google finds a 410 page, it'll be removed from the index but because 404 is 'file not found' the page may stay in the index, potentially giving bad user experience as outlined by Matt Williamson.
However, I would always redirect if you can - even if you just send traffic to the homepage, it's got to be a better user experience than sending them to a 404 page. I think anyway!
More info here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/http-status-codes
You mention a concern over too many redirects - I think this page may help eliminate your fears: http://www.stateofdigital.com/matt-cutts-there-is-no-limit-to-direct-301-redirects-there-is-on-chains/
Thanks,
Amelia
-
Matt, thanks.. Good points for sure. My concern is that since something like 50% of new businesses close doors within 5 years, so the list of redirected urls will just keep getting bigger over time..Is that a concern? I guess over time less people will link to the defunct businesses, but I will still have to track them..maybe at some point when the number of links to them is small it would make sense to then 404 them? Of course, I'd still need to track which ones to 404, so i'm now wondering when 404 ever makes sense on prior legitimate pages..
Just to be clear -- redirecting does remove the old link from the index, right?
-
404's can loose link juice and cause the most issues when a page that had lots of link pointing to it passing authority becomes a 404 page. As this page no longer exists the authority that was being passed to it from the links that were pointing at it will be lost when Google eventually de-indexes the page. You also must remember that this page is likely to be in Google Index and if people click on it and it is not found they are more likely to bounce from your site. You will also loose what terms this page was ranking for when it is eventually de-indexed as well. Redirecting this page to its new location or a similar/relevant page will help keep most of this authority that has been earnt helping with your ranking and keeping human visitors happy.
You also need to think of this from a crawl point of view - lots of 404s doesn't make your site very friendly as Googlebot is wasting time trying to crawl pages that don't exist. Ultimately making sure you don't have 404 pages and keep on top of redirecting these is important particularly if the page had authority. A great big hint to the importance is the fact that Google reports these crawl issues in Google Webmaster Tools in order for you to be able to monitor and fix them.
On a side note I have seen cases where sites have had a lot of 404s due to a significant change of URL structure and they haven't done any redirects - they have lost the majority of their organic rankings and traffic!
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
-
Location Links in Footer
Our business is in 10 cities. We offer identical services in each city, there's absolutely nothing different about the services we offer based on location. We have a contact page for each city with a bit of unique content (phone, address, photo of city, list of counties we service). It really would be a grey area to create subsites for each city and try to rewrite the service description content 10 times. However, we want to improve organic results. We of course have Google Places listings for each city. From an on-page SEO perspective, wouldn't it only have the possibility of benefiting, not hurting local SEO but add the city name linked to that city's contact page in the footer? I've seen arguments against it, and could see maybe if you were in like 50 cities instead of 10, but is there really any observed downside to doing that in the footer for every page? We can't title the difference service pages with the city name in the headings or page title, so at least we'd have anchor text in the footer.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wizkids9640 -
Crawl and Indexation Error - Googlebot can't/doesn't access specific folders on microsites
Hi, My first time posting here, I am just looking for some feedback on a indexation issue we have with a client and any feedback on possible next steps or items I may have overlooked. To give some background, our client operates a website for the core band and a also a number of microsites based on specific business units, so you have corewebsite.com along with bu1.corewebsite.com, bu2.corewebsite.com. The content structure isn't ideal, as each microsite follows a structure of bu1.corewebsite.com/bu1/home.aspx, bu2.corewebsite.com/bu2/home.aspx and so on. In addition to this each microsite has duplicate folders from the other microsites so bu1.corewebsite.com has indexable folders bu1.corewebsite.com/bu1/home.aspx but also bu1.corewebsite.com/bu2/home.aspx the same with bu2.corewebsite.com has bu2.corewebsite.com/bu2/home.aspx but also bu2.corewebsite.com/bu1/home.aspx. Therre are 5 different business units so you have this duplicate content scenario for all microsites. This situation is being addressed in the medium term development roadmap and will be rectified in the next iteration of the site but that is still a ways out. The issue
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ImpericMedia
About 6 weeks ago we noticed a drop off in search rankings for two of our microsites (bu1.corewebsite.com and bu2.corewebsite.com) over a period of 2-3 weeks pretty much all our terms dropped out of the rankings and search visibility dropped to essentially 0. I can see that pages from the websites are still indexed but oddly it is the duplicate content pages so (bu1.corewebsite.com/bu3/home.aspx or (bu1.corewebsite.com/bu4/home.aspx is still indexed, similiarly on the bu2.corewebsite microsite bu2.corewebsite.com/bu3/home.aspx and bu4.corewebsite.com/bu3/home.aspx are indexed but no pages from the BU1 or BU2 content directories seem to be indexed under their own microsites. Logging into webmaster tools I can see there is a "Google couldn't crawl your site because we were unable to access your site's robots.txt file." This was a bit odd as there was no robots.txt in the root directory but I got some weird results when I checked the BU1/BU2 microsites in technicalseo.com robots text tool. Also due to the fact that there is a redirect from bu1.corewebsite.com/ to bu1.corewebsite.com/bu4.aspx I thought maybe there could be something there so consequently we removed the redirect and added a basic robots to the root directory for both microsites. After this we saw a small pickup in site visibility, a few terms pop into our Moz campaign rankings but drop out again pretty quickly. Also the error message in GSC persisted. Steps taken so far after that In Google Search Console, I confirmed there are no manual actions against the microsites. Confirmed there is no instances of noindex on any of the pages for BU1/BU2 A number of the main links from the root domain to microsite BU1/BU2 have a rel="noopener noreferrer" attribute but we looked into this and found it has no impact on indexation Looking into this issue we saw some people had similar issues when using Cloudflare but our client doesn't use this service Using a response redirect header tool checker, we noticed a timeout when trying to mimic googlebot accessing the site Following on from point 5 we got a hold of a week of server logs from the client and I can see Googlebot successfully pinging the site and not getting 500 response codes from the server...but couldn't see any instance of it trying to index microsite BU1/BU2 content So it seems to me that the issue could be something server side but I'm at a bit of a loss of next steps to take. Any advice at all is much appreciated!0 -
What is future of Link building ? Any link building experts Here ?
Hey Everyone, its Muhammad Umair Ghufran I have one question about Link Building ? As my Knowledge Google Love the Quality content but Link building rank some low quality website Right ? So, what is the future of link building ; please explain indeep with complete reference for better understanding Thanks Regards: Muhammad Umair Ghufran
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muhammadumairghufran0 -
Is the image property really required for Google's breadcrumbs structured data type?
In its structured data (i.e., Schema.org) documentation, Google says that the "image" property is required for the breadcrumbs data type. That seems new to me, and it seems unnecessary for breadcrumbs. Does anyone think this really matters to Google? More info about breadcrumbs data type:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ryan-Ricketts
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/breadcrumbs I asked Google directly here:
https://twitter.com/RyanRicketts/status/7554782668788531220 -
Directories that Redirect - Do They Pass Link Juice?
I did some searching before asking but could not quite find what I was looking for. There are valid directories out there that provide business as well as links that provide SEO value. My question is whether or not having a redirect in place negates passing any link juice. When I use Open Site Explorer for Old Monterey Inn, this directory (CABBI) does not show up on their list. However, their website dropped from Google Analytics altogether for some time because of an issue in how they built their site. Their "fix" is this redirect which was integrated a short time ago. I do see traffic in Google Analytics now but wonder about the link juice. Example: <a href="[/redirect?type=website&inn=34211&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oldmontereyinn.com](view-source:https://www.cabbi.com/redirect?type=website&inn=34211&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oldmontereyinn.com)" target="<a class="attribute-value">_blank</a>">www.oldmontereyinn.coma>p> What say you? Thanks to anyone that responds.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ColoradoMarketingTeam0 -
OSE link report showing links to 404 pages on my site
I did a link analysis on this site mormonwiki.com. And many of the pages shown to be linked to were pages like these http://www.mormonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Planning_a_trip_to_Rome_By_using_Movie_theatre_-_Your_five_Fun_Shows2052752 There happens to be thousands of them and these pages actually no longer exist but the links to them obviously still do. I am planning to proceed by disavowing these links to the pages that don't exist. Does anyone see any reason to not do this, or that doing this would be unnecessary? Another issue is that Google is not really crawling this site, in WMT they are reporting to have not crawled a single URL on the site. Does anyone think the above issue would have something to do with this? And/or would you have any insight on how to remedy it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThridHour0 -
Link juice site structure?
If we have a top nav with contact us, about us, delivery, FAQ, Gallery, how to order ect but none of these we want to rank and then we have the usual left hand nav.are we wasting juice with the top nav and would we be better either removing it and putting them further down the page or consolidating them and adding an extra products tab so the product pages are first.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
What NAP format do I use if the USPS can't even find my client's address?
My client has a site already listed on Google+Local under "5208 N 1st St". He has some other NAPs, e.g., YellowPages, under "5208 N First Street". The USPS finds neither of these, nor any variation that I can possibly think of! Which is better? Do I just take the one that Google has accepted and make all the others like it as best I can? And doesn't it matter that the USPS doesn't even recognize the thing? Or no? Local SEO wizards, thanks in advance for your guidance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft0