Does 404 hurts my website.?
-
Does 404 hurts my website.? My website reporting 404 crawl errors on pages that have never been part of the website. Site showing lot of 404 errors and all errors from Blog.We didn't create any pages .Automatically pages are created and showing 404 (Not Found) error response..Please any one help me to identify those issues.?
-
Hi,
Yes & No . I'm quoting Google on this read it carefully you will get the whole idea about 404.
Q: Do the 404 errors reported in Webmaster Tools affect my site’s ranking?
A: 404s are a perfectly normal part of the web; the Internet is always changing, new content is born, old content dies, and when it dies it (ideally) returns a 404 HTTP response code. Search engines are aware of this; we have 404 errors on our own sites, as you can see above, and we find them all over the web. In fact, we actually prefer that, when you get rid of a page on your site, you make sure that it returns a proper 404 or 410 response code (rather than a “soft 404”). Keep in mind that in order for our crawler to see the HTTP response code of a URL, it has to be able to crawl that URL—if the URL is blocked by your robots.txt file we won’t be able to crawl it and see its response code. The fact that some URLs on your site no longer exist / return 404s does not affect how your site’s other URLs (the ones that return 200 (Successful)) perform in our search results.
Q: So 404s don’t hurt my website at all?
A: If some URLs on your site 404, this fact alone does not hurt you or count against you in Google’s search results. However, there may be other reasons that you’d want to address certain types of 404s. For example, if some of the pages that 404 are pages you actually care about, you should look into why we’re seeing 404s when we crawl them! If you see a misspelling of a legitimate URL (www.example.com/awsome instead of www.example.com/awesome), it’s likely that someone intended to link to you and simply made a typo. Instead of returning a 404, you could 301 redirect the misspelled URL to the correct URL and capture the intended traffic from that link. You can also make sure that, when users do land on a 404 page on your site, you help them find what they were looking for rather than just saying “404 Not found."Hope that helps.
Thanks
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
-
My android website not showing on results
my website will index good،and its top on some few keywords but its not top for many keywords . << some time it showed on results but will be hidden after some time >> what you thing??? url is https://android-apk.org
Technical SEO | | moztabliq10 -
Is an international redirect hurting my ranking
We're a small international company that redirects users based on their language identifier.
Technical SEO | | _entreprenerd
I've now taken a big interest in and also how it affects ranking. When I look at my MOZ dashboard the fundedbyme.com domain has a higher ranking than fundedbyme.com/en/ for example. Our company wants to target other markets such as Spain and Germany, I am imposing penalties on myself by not having rel="canonical" in place and redirecting to the TLD?0 -
Https and 404 code that goes into htaccess
The 404 error code we put into htaccess files for our websites does not work correctly for our https site. We recently changed one of our http sites to https. When we went to create a 404.html page for it by creating an htaccess folder with the 404 error code in it, once we uploaded the file all of our webpages were displaying incorrectly, as if the css was not attached. The 404 code we used works successfully for our other 404.html pages for our other sites (www.telfordinc.com/404.html). However, it does not work for the https site. Below is the 404 error code we are using for our https site (currently not uploaded until pages display correctly) ErrorDocument 404 /404-error.html RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?privatemoneyhardmoneyloan.com/.*$ [NC] RewriteRule .(gif|jpg|js|css)$ - [F] Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.privatemoneyhardmoneyloan.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.privatemoneyhardmoneyloan.com/$1 [R=301,L] So we want to know if there is a different 404 error code that goes into the htaccess file for an https vs. http? Appreciate your feedback on this issue
Technical SEO | | Manifestation0 -
Sitemap issue - Tons of 404 errors
We've recreated a client site in a subdirectory (mysite.com/newsite) of his domain and when it was ready to go live, added code to the htaccess file in order to display the revamped website on the main url. These are the directions that were followed to do this: http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory and http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress#When_Your_Domain_Name_or_URLs_Change. This has worked perfectly except that we are now receiving a lot of 404 errors am I'm wondering if this isn't the root of our evil. This is a WordPress self-hosted website and we are actively using the WordPress SEO plugin that creates multiple folders with only 50 links in each. The sitemap_index.xml file tests well in Google Analytics but is pulling a number of links from the subdirectory folder. I'm wondering if it really is the manner in which we made the site live that is our issue or if there is another problem that I cannot see yet. What is the best way to attack this issue? Any clues? The site in question is www.atozqualityfencing.com https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/
Technical SEO | | JanetJ0 -
Document.referrer Is that harmful to my website?
Someone (maybe my Competitors) open a subdomain on tumblr.com. Just like keywordxxx.tumblr.com , and use following script to redirect to my website. var s=document.referrer; if(s.indexOf("google")>0 || s.indexOf("bing")>0 || s.indexOf("yahoo")>0 || s.indexOf ("aol")>0){ self.location='mywebsiteurl'; } so , If anyone seach in google ,and click on keywordxxx.tumblr.com , this script will direct the user to my website. I have found many cases like that, is that harmful ? how can i avoid that?
Technical SEO | | sunvary0 -
When will seomoz rank my website?
Hi all, I am really excited to be here. I joined seo moz three weeks ago. Seo moz crawled my website twice and still under competitive domain analysis my domain authority is 1 and everything else underneath is zero. I fixed some errors and warning after first crawl but still nothing in root domain metrics. Can anyone please explain whats happening? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | proaspirant0 -
Duplicate Content within Website - problem?
Hello everyone, I am currently working on a big site which sells thousands of widgets. However each widget has ten sub widgets (1,2,3... say) My strategy with this site is to target the long tail search so I'm creating static pages for each possibly variation. So I'll have a main product page on widgets in general, and also a page on widget1, page on widget2 etc etc. I'm anticipating that because there's so much competition for searches relating to widgets in general, I'll get most of my traffic from people being more specific and searching for widget1 or widget 7 etc. Now here's the problem - I am getting a lot of content written for this website - a few hundred words for each widget. However I can't go to the extreme of writing unique content for each sub widget - that would mean 10's of 1,000's of articles. So... what do I do with the content. Put it on the main widget page was the plan but what do I do about the sub pages. I could put it there and it would make perfect sense to a reader and be relevant to people specifically looking for widget1, say, but could there be a issue with it being viewed as duplicate content. One idea was to just put a snippet (first 100 words) on each sub page with a link back to the main widget page where the full copy would be. Not sure whether I've made myself clear at all but hopefully I have - or I can clarify. Thanks so much in advance David
Technical SEO | | OzDave0 -
404 erros on wordpress blog
Both SEOMOZ and Google webmaster tools report lots of 404 errors throughout my wordpress blog. I have the url structure set to category/title Most of the 404 errors seem to be that the crawler is looking for a /home.html page. Each time I add a new post I get more 404 errors. I could, of course, add 301 redirects but I presume there is an easy way to do this within the WP setup. Any ideas? Thanks
Technical SEO | | bjalc20110